would let him defeat himself, for she knew he was certain to do it.
It was de Cyon himself who arranged the transfer of Callendar to the African service, and so it happened that they went to Tunis for the honeymoon to a villa on the outskirts of the city which belonged to one of Thérèse's Greek cousins, a man who served as head of the Mediterranean banks of Leopopulos et Cie. Ellen wrote to them regularly, letters which were like all the others she had ever written her mother since that first one from the Babylon Arms, restrained, careful and filled with a host of details from which one could gather nothing, and at the end always the same comment on the weather and the beauty of their garden with a brief line to the effect that "we are well and happy."
In the Rue Raynouard, Gramp lived the same life that he had lived for thirty years. He had his books (for Hattie was rich now and expense no longer mattered) and he had his rocking chair placed absurdly among the Empire furniture of the room which Lily had given him. Nothing had changed save that his windows looked out upon a garden laid out by Le Nôtre and that he could hear the whistles of the boats on the Seine and that he went sometimes afoot on solitary expeditions through the neighboring streets, once as far as the Invalides. It was his habit to steal away secretly through the gate in the garden wall leading into the Rue de Passy. He remained inscrutable, uncommunicative and aloof, save with Jean for whom he displayed a fancy. And none of them knew that the thing he was looking for on these solitary meanderings was a youth which had returned to him now with an unearthly clarity, though there were moments when he was childish and could not remember that he was in Paris or what had happened to him only yesterday.
And Hattie, living now with Lily, began slowly to regain her interest in life. She took to inspecting the big house room by
