The Garden of Swords by Max Pemberton

Brandon dined in his little room above the office near the Porte des Pierres; and when dusk fell he set out to walk to the Contades and to his favourite cafe there. The ball which Therese Lavencourt was to give had no longer an interest for him. He sought to be alone and to forget the day.

It was almost dusk when he reached the park, and he remembered, in spite of himself, that Beatrix would be already in the farmhouse on the hills above the Sauer. He had not wished to think of it, and had gone to the gardens that friends might help him to forget; but when a waiter had served him with coffee and he had read the papers from Paris, it seemed to him that a greater sense of solitude possessed him than he had ever known since he left Cambridge and came, at his father's wish, to help his father's business in Strasburg. One day had changed his view of life. While she was in the city, he could forget the reasons that kept him to a merchant's desk and had expatriated him. He could forget the years of public-school life in the England he had left. He could forget his own ambitions buried in those vast and dusty cellars of Frankfort wherefrom his father, William North, sent the Rhine wine to the courts of Europe. But Beatrix was in Strasburg no more. He would not have believed yesterday that there was such a lonely place in all the world.