And all this might be merely an emotional color in his own outlook on unchanged facts, but the color certainly was there, making a faintly tinted difference over all the mental landscape.
It was during the first days of this dim perplexity that he found himself alone once more with Madame Vicaud. He had outstayed all her guests on a Tuesday afternoon, and, the Viberts having taken Claire back to dine with them, Madame Vicaud asked the young man to share her solitude.
Now, when they were alone, and while he sat cutting the leaves of a new book they were to read together, she went about the room, putting things back in their places, closing the piano--a little restless in her restoration of composure to the room.
Presently she came to him, stood beside him, looking down at the book. "Always friends, you know," she said, putting a hand on his shoulder and speaking lightly, almost incidentally.
"Why not?" Damier asked, looking up at her.
"Indeed, why not?" she returned, smiling. "Nothing, I hope, would ever change our friendship."
"Nothing could." She stood silently beside him, looking down, not at him, but at the volume of essays, and he added: "You will tell me if you are ever in any trouble or sorrow where I could help you, if ever so little?"
"Oh, yes; I will tell you," she answered, still with the lightness that contrasted with the tremor of Damier's voice.
Moving away, she asked him, presently, if he did not think that Claire's singing that afternoon had been very intelligent. She had sung Orféo's song of search and supplication through Hades, her mother accompanying her on the harp. Damier had not altogether cared for Claire's interpretation of the song. Claire's voice had thrown an enchantment around a rather over-emotional, yet an untender, conception of it.
"The song is to me one of the most beautiful parts of the opera," said Madame Vicaud; "that lonely, steadfast love, throbbing onward, through horror."
"Ah," was on Damier's lips, "you have said what she could not sing"; but he had long felt that appreciation of Claire was the greatest pleasure he could give to her mother, and depreciation the greatest pain. He therefore sat silently looking at her, leaning forward, his hands clasped around the idle book-cutter; and Madame Vicaud, with all her calm, went on presently, taking up her sewing as she sat near the lamp with its plain green shade: "Do you think Claire's life very gray--very dreary?"