meal, who does not
want to be alone.

Then he smoked several pipes in the hall while the table was being
cleared. After that he went back to his room.

As soon as he had locked himself in he looked, under the bed, opened all
the closets, explored every corner, rummaged through all the furniture.
Then he lighted the candles on the mantelpiece, and, turning round
several times, ran his eye all over the apartment with an anguish of
terror that distorted his face, for he knew well that he would see
her, as he did every night--little Louise Roque, the little girl he had
attacked and afterward strangled.

Every night the odious vision came back again. First he seemed to hear
a kind of roaring sound, such as is made by a threshing machine or the
distant passage of a train over a bridge. Then he commenced to gasp,
to suffocate, and he had to unbutton his collar and his belt. He moved
about to make his blood circulate, he tried to read, he attempted to
sing. It was in vain. His thoughts, in spite of himself, went back to
the day of the murder and made him begin it all over again in all its
most secret details, with all the violent emotions he had experienced
from the first minute to the last.

He had felt on rising that morning, the morning of the horrible day, a
little dizziness and headache, which he attributed to the heat, so that
he remained in his room until breakfast time.

After the meal he had taken a siesta, then, toward the close of the
afternoon, he had gone out to breathe the fresh, soothing breeze under
the trees in the wood.

But, as soon as he was outside, the heavy, scorching air of the plain
oppressed him still more. The sun, still high in the heavens, poured
down on the parched soil waves of burning light. Not a breath of wind
stirred the leaves. Every beast and bird, even the grasshoppers, were
silent. Renardet reached the tall trees and began to walk over the moss
where the Brindille produced a slight freshness of the air beneath the
immense roof of branches. But he felt ill at ease. It seemed to him that
an unknown, invisible hand was strangling him, and he scarcely thought
of anything, having usually few ideas in his head. For the last three
months only one thought haunted him, the thought of marrying again. He
suffered from living alone, suffered from it morally and physically.
Accustomed for ten years past to feeling a woman near him, habituated to
her presence every moment, he had need, an imperio