wish him to know
at first what interest I take in him. Shall we say the day after
to-morrow?"

"Yes, the evening of the day after to-morrow, if it pleases you, dear
madame."

On the morrow Morange displayed so much agitation that the wife of the
door-porter of the house where he resided, a woman who was ever watching
him, imparted her fears to her husband. The old gentleman was certainly
going to have an attack, for he had forgotten to put on his slippers
when he came downstairs to fetch some water in the morning; and,
besides, he went on talking to himself, and looked dreadfully upset. The
most extraordinary incident of the day, however, was that after lunch
Morange quite forgot himself, and was an hour late in returning to his
office, a lack of punctuality which had no precedent, which, in the
memory of everybody at the works, had never occurred before.

As a matter of fact, Morange had been carried away as by a storm, and,
walking straight before him, had once more found himself on the Grenelle
bridge, where Denis had one day saved him from the fascination of the
water. And some force, some impulse had carried him again to the very
same spot, and made him lean over the same parapet, gazing, in the same
way as previously, at the flowing river. Ever since the previous evening
he had been repeating the same words, words which he stammered in an
undertone, and which haunted and tortured him. "Would he allow that
fresh crime to be committed without shouting aloud what he knew?" No
doubt it was those words, of which he could not rid himself, that had
made him forget to put on his slippers in the morning, and that had just
now again dazed him to the point of preventing him from returning to the
factory, as if he no longer recognized the entrance as he passed it. And
if he were at present leaning over that water, had he not been impelled
thither by an unconscious desire to have done with all his troubles,
an instinctive hope of drowning the torment into which he was thrown
by those stubbornly recurring words? Down below, at the bottom of the
river, those words would at last cease; he would no longer repeat them;
he would no longer hear them urging him to an act of energy for which he
could not find sufficient strength. And the call of the water was very
gentle, and it would be so pleasant to have to struggle no longer, to
yield to destiny, like a poor soft-hearted weakling who has lived too
long.

Morange leant forward