t of the femme de chambre, whom he thought rather impertinent; he
had really no intention whatever of entering that classic thoroughfare.
He took long walks, rambled on the beach, along the base of the cliffs
and among the brown sea-caves, and he thought a good deal of certain
incidents which have figured at an earlier stage of this narrative. He
had forbidden himself the future, as an object of contemplation, and
it was therefore a matter of necessity that his imagination should take
refuge among the warm and familiar episodes of the past. He wondered why
Mrs. Vivian should have left the place so suddenly, and was of course
struck with the analogy between this incident and her abrupt departure
from Baden. It annoyed him, it troubled him, but it by no means
rekindled the alarm he had felt on first perceiving the injured Angela
on the beach. That alarm had been quenched by Angela's manner during
the hour that followed and during their short talk in the evening. This
evening was to be forever memorable, for it had brought with it the
revelation which still, at moments, suddenly made Bernard tremble; but
it had also brought him the assurance that Angela cared as little as
possible for anything that a chance acquaintance might have said about
her. It is all the more singular, therefore, that one evening, after he
had been at Blanquais a fortnight, a train of thought should suddenly
have been set in motion in his mind. It was kindled by no outward
occurrence, but by some wandering spark of fancy or of memory, and the
immediate effect of it was to startle our hero very much as he had been
startled on the evening I have described. The circumstances were the
same; he had wandered down to the beach alone, very late, and he stood
looking at the duskily-tumbling sea. Suddenly the same voice that had
spoken before murmured another phrase in the darkness, and it rang upon
his ear for the rest of the night. It startled him, as I have said,
at first; then, the next morning, it led him to take his departure for
Paris. During the journey it lingered in his ear; he sat in the corner
of the railway-carriage with his eyes closed, abstracted, on purpose to
prolong the reverberation. If it were not true it was at least, as the
Italians have it, ben trovato, and it was wonderful how well it bore
thinking of. It bears telling less well; but I can at least give a hint
of it. The theory that Angela hated him had evaporated in her presence,
and ano