o answer. While he was dipping his fingers in the glass bowl,
he saw she was so tired that he dared not say any more. He found himself
in the presence of a secret which he did not wish to know; in presence
of an intimate suffering which one word would reveal. He felt anxiety,
fear, and a certain respect.

He threw down his napkin.

"Excuse me, dear."

He went out.

She tried to eat, but could swallow nothing.

At two o'clock she returned to the little house of the Ternes. She
found Jacques in his room. He was smoking a wooden pipe. A cup of coffee
almost empty was on the table. He looked at her with a harshness that
chilled her. She dared not talk, feeling that everything that she could
say would offend and irritate him, and yet she knew that in remaining
discreet and dumb she intensified his anger. He knew that she would
return; he had waited for her with impatience. A sudden light came to
her, and she saw that she had done wrong to come; that if she had been
absent he would have desired, wanted, called for her, perhaps. But it
was too late; and, at all events, she was not trying to be crafty.

She said to him:

"You see I have returned. I could not do otherwise. And then it was
natural, since I love you. And you know it."

She knew very well that all she could say would only irritate him. He
asked her whether that was the way she spoke in the Rue Spontini.

She looked at him with sadness.

"Jacques, you have often told me that there were hatred and anger in
your heart against me. You like to make me suffer. I can see it."

With ardent patience, at length, she told him her entire life, the
little that she had put into it; the sadness of the past; and how, since
he had known her, she had lived only through him and in him.

The words fell as limpid as her look. She sat near him. He listened
to her with bitter avidity. Cruel with himself, he wished to know
everything about her last meetings with the other. She reported
faithfully the events of the Great Britain Hotel; but she changed the
scene to the outside, in an alley of the Casino, from fear that the
image of their sad interview in a closed room should irritate her lover.
Then she explained the meeting at the station. She had not wished to
cause despair to a suffering man who was so violent. But since then
she had had no news from him until the day when he spoke to her on the
street. She repeated what she had replied to him. Two days later she had
seen