ffer!"

"Suffer? Yes, I have suffered!" Overcome by the returning pain of the
memory, he dropped into a chair, trying to control his voice. "Yes, I
have suffered!"

"Forgive me!" she said, slipping on her knees beside him, and burying
her head in his lap.

"I was out of my head--I don't know what I did, what I said. It was as
though a bomb had exploded. My life was wrecked, shattered--nothing
left."

He felt the grief again, even more acutely. He suffered for what he had
suffered.

"Jack, I never really could have _abandoned_ you," she cried bitterly.
She raised her eyes toward him and suddenly took notice of the
time-tables that lay clutched in his hands. "Oh, you were going away!"

He nodded, incapable of speech.

"You were running away?"

"I was running away--to forget--to bury myself!"

"Oh, Jack!"

"There was nothing here. It was all a blank! I was running away--to bury
myself!"

At the memory of that miserable hopeless moment, in which he had
resolved on flight, the tears, no longer to be denied, came dripping
down his cheeks.

THE LIE

I

For some time they had ceased to speak, too oppressed with the needless
anguish of this their last night. At their feet the tiny shining windows
of Etretat were dropping back into the night, as though sinking under
the rise of that black, mysterious flood that came luminously from the
obscure regions of the faint sky. Overhead, the swollen August stars had
faded before the pale flush that, toward the lighthouse on the cliff,
heralded the red rise of the moon.

He held himself a little apart, the better to seize every filmy detail
of the strange woman who had come inexplicably into his life, watching
the long, languorous arms stretched out into an impulsive clasp, the
dramatic harmony of the body, the brooding head, the soft, half-revealed
line of the neck. The troubling alchemy of the night, that before his
eyes slowly mingled the earth with the sea and the sea with the sky,
seemed less mysterious than this woman whose body was as immobile as the
stillness in her soul.

All at once he felt in her, whom he had known as he had known no other,
something unknown, the coming of another woman, belonging to another
life, the life of the opera and the multitude, which would again flatter
and intoxicate her. The summer had passed without a doubt, and now, all
at once, something new came to him, indefinable, colored with the vague
terror of the night,