What an evening, what a night the unfortunate woman passed, locked in her room! What courage it needed not to remain there all the following day, with windows closed, curtains down! How she longed to flee the daylight, life, to flee from herself, plunged and engulfed in a night and silence as of death!--But she was the daughter of an officer and the wife of a prince. She had thus twice over the trait of a military education, an absolute exactitude in carrying out her promises, a trait that causes the disciplined will to rise superior to all events and to execute at the appointed time the duties imposed. She had promised the night before to intercede with Dickie Marsh in Chésy's favor, and she was to give his reply in the afternoon. Her lassitude was so great in the morning that she nearly wrote to Madame Chésy to postpone her visit and that to the American's yacht. Then she said, "No, that would be cowardly."--And at eleven o'clock in the morning, her face hidden by a white veil that prevented her reddened eyes and agitated features from being seen, she stepped from her carriage on to the little quay to which the Jenny was moored. When she saw the rigging of the yacht and her white hull outlined against the sky, pale with the presage of heat, she remembered her arrival upon the same sun-scorched stones of the little quay, in the same carriage, only a fortnight before, and the profound joy she felt when she saw Pierre's silhouette as he looked for her from the boat anxiously. Those two weeks had been long enough for her romantic and tender idyl to be transformed into a sinister tragedy. Where was the lover who was with her when they left for Genoa? Where was he trying to hide the awful pain caused by her and which she could not even console? Had he already left Cannes? Ever since the night before the idea that Pierre had left her forever had made her heart icy with cold terror. And yet she devoured with her eyes the yacht upon which she had been so happy. She was now near enough to be able to count the portholes, of which the line appeared just above the rail of a cutter moored near the Jenny. The seventh was the one lighting her cabin, their cabin, the nuptial refuge where they had tasted the intoxicating joy of their first night of love. A sailor was seated upon a plank suspended from the rail washing the shell of the boat with a brush that he dipped from time to time in a big bucket. The triviality of the detail, of the work being done at that minute and at that place, completed the faintness of the young woman caused by the air of contrast. She was speechless with emotion when she stepped upon the gangway leading from the quay to the boat. Her agitation was so apparent that Dickie Marsh could not resist an inclination to question her, thus failing for once to observe the great Anglo-Saxon principle of avoiding personal remarks. "It is nothing," she replied; "or rather nothing that concerns me."