ave lain down and died.

Without getting up, and leaning on her elbow, she spread out the skirt
and coat and other things on the sand beside her, then she stretched her
aching limbs to the warmth.

The wind had fallen to almost a dead calm, and as she lay she saw little
rabbits stealing out to play in the sunshine on the sands. She watched
them running in circles like things on wheels and moving by clockwork.
Then she closed her eyes, but still she saw them circling, circling,
circling.

Then she was in the toy department of the Magazin du Louvre and a
shop-woman was shewing her toy rabbits that ran in circles, five francs
each.

She awoke at noon; the sore throat was gone, her bones no longer ached
and the great beach lay under the heat of noon, humming like a
stretched string to the touch of the sea.

Her left arm and side and thigh were scorched by the sun, but that was
nothing; the sense of illness was gone, and her mind, quite clear and
renewed, had regained its balance.

She remembered everything. La Touche was lying there in the cave, dead.
The knife that had killed him she could see lying on the sand where she
had dropped it; she had killed him. All these monstrous facts seemed
old, settled and done with and of little more interest than the things
and events of a year ago.

What seemed new was the beach and its desolation--its emptiness. It was
as though a crowd of people had suddenly vanished from it; a crowd that
any moment might return. The place seemed waiting and watching.

She cast her eyes towards the rocks of the Lizard Point and then towards
the cave mouth; then hurriedly she began to put on her clothes, now dry
and warm, and having dressed she stood for a moment again looking about
her.

She could see the penguins in the distance going through their endless
evolutions, and the rhythmical sound of the sea came from near and far
mixed with the chanting and crying of the gulls. At any moment Bompard
might appear labouring over those rocks, at any moment La Touche might
step from the cave where he lay. That is what the beach told her, though
she knew that the forms of the two men would appear no more; that she
was here alone, utterly alone.

She took shelter from the sun in the men's cave. Bompard's tinder box
was lying on the sand and half a box of Swedish matches. The men's
blankets were tossed in a corner and the provisions and utensils were in
their proper place. On a plate by the bags of