les surged up in her memory and she felt it necessary
to explain her acts.

"You have not been able to understand me. You are ignorant of the
truth.... When I met you on the road to Paestum, you were a souvenir of
my past, a fragment of my youth, of the time in which I knew the doctor
only vaguely, and was not yet compromised in the service of
'information.'... From the very beginning your love and enthusiasm made
an impression upon me. You represented an interesting diversion with
your Spanish gallantry, waiting for me outside the hotel in order to
besiege me with your promises and vows. I was greatly bored during the
enforced waiting at Naples. You also found yourself obliged to wait,
and sought in me an agreeable recreation.... One day I came to
understand that you truly were interesting me greatly, as no other man
had ever interested me.... I suspected that I was going to fall in love
with you."

"It's a lie!... It's a lie," murmured Ferragut spitefully.

"Say what you will, but that was the way of it. We love according to
the place and the moment. If we had met on some other occasion, we
might have seen each other for a few hours, no more, each following his
own road without further consideration. We belong to different
worlds.... But we were mobilized in the same country, oppressed by the
tedium of waiting, and what had to be ... was. I am telling you the
entire truth: if you could know what it has cost me to avoid you!...

"In the mornings, on arising in the room in my hotel, my first motion
was to look through the curtains in order to convince myself that you
were waiting for me in the street. 'There is my devoted: there is my
sweetheart!' Perhaps you had slept badly thinking about me, while I was
feeling my soul reborn within me, the soul of a girl of twenty,
enthusiastic and artless.... My first impulse was to come down and join
you, going with you along the gulf shores like two lovers out of a
novel. Then reflection would come to my rescue. My past would come
tumbling into my mind like an old bell fallen from its tower. I had
forgotten that past, and its recurrence deafened me with its
overwhelming jangle vibrating with memories. 'Poor man!... Into what a
world of compromises and entanglements I am going to involve him!...
No! No!' And I fled from you with the cunning of a mischievous
schoolgirl, coming out from the hotel when you had gone off for a few
moments, at other times doubling a corner at the ver