Barral could
not quite command his muscles, as yet. But he had recovered command of
his gentle voice.

"You were just saying that in this wide world there we were, only you
and I, to stick to each other."

She was dimly aware of the scathing intention lurking in these soft low
tones, in these words which appealed to her poignantly. She defended
herself. Never, never for a single moment had she ceased to think of
him. Neither did he cease to think of her, he said, with as much
sinister emphasis as he was capable of.

"But, papa," she cried, "I haven't been shut up like you." She didn't
mind speaking of it because he was innocent. He hadn't been understood.
It was a misfortune of the most cruel kind but no more disgraceful than
an illness, a maiming accident or some other visitation of blind fate.
"I wish I had been too. But I was alone out in the world, the horrid
world, that very world which had used you so badly."

"And you couldn't go about in it without finding somebody to fall in
love with?" he said. A jealous rage affected his brain like the fumes
of wine, rising from some secret depths of his being so long deprived of
all emotions. The hollows at the corners of his lips became more
pronounced in the puffy roundness of his cheeks. Images, visions,
obsess with particular force, men withdrawn from the sights and sounds
of active life. "And I did nothing but think of you!" he exclaimed
under his breath, contemptuously. "Think of you! You haunted me, I
tell you."

Flora said to herself that there was a being who loved her. "Then we
have been haunting each other," she declared with a pang of remorse.
For indeed he had haunted her nearly out of the world, into a final and
irremediable desertion. "Some day I shall tell you... No. I don't
think I can ever tell you. There was a time when I was mad. But what's
the good? It's all over now. We shall forget all this. There shall be
nothing to remind us."

De Barral moved his shoulders.

"I should think you were mad to tie yourself to ... How long is it
since you are married?"

She answered "Not long" that being the only answer she dared to make.
Everything was so different from what she imagined it would be. He
wanted to know why she had said nothing of it in any of her letters; in
her last letter. She said:

"It was after."

"So recently!" he wondered. "Couldn't you wait at least till I came
out? You could have told me; asked me; consul