He wished to speak; he could not. Their hands remained clasped. They did not look at each other, but each knew that the other was holding back the tears, ready to flow. . . . They were at the station; they had to be discreet. Roger installed Annette in her carriage. She was not alone in the compartment. They had to restrict themselves to commonplace courtesies; but the eyes of each were avidly seizing upon the image of the other's beloved face. The engine whistled. "Till we meet again!" they said. And they were thinking: "Never!" The train pulled out. Roger returned home in the falling night. His heart was full of sorrow and of anger. Of anger against Annette. Of anger against himself. He felt torn asunder. He felt--oh, shame!--he felt relieved. . . . And stopping his horse on the deserted road, in contempt for himself and in contempt for love, he wept bitterly. XVII Annette returned home to the Boulogne house, and there she shut herself up. When the letter to the Brissots had gone off, she severed all connections with the outside world. None of her friends knew that she had returned. She opened no letters. For days she never left the floor on which she lived. Her old aunt, accustomed not to understand her and not to worry about it, respected her isolation. Her external life seemed suspended. Her other, secret life was only the more intense. Her silence was swept by storms of wounded passion. She had to be alone so that she might abandon herself to them to the point of exhaustion. She emerged from them broken, her blood drained, her mouth parched, with burning brow, and hands and feet like ice. There followed torpid periods given over to deep dreams. For days she dreamed; and she made no effort to direct her thoughts. She was invaded by a confused mass of mingled emotions. . . . A somber melancholy, a bitter sweetness, a taste of ashes in the mouth, disappointed hopes, sudden flashes of memory that made her heart leap, fits of embittered despair, pride and passion, and a sense of ruin, of the irremediable, of a Fate against which all efforts are vain,--at first a crushing feeling, then mournful, then dissolving into a drowsiness whose distant sorrow was marked by a strange pleasure. . . . She did not understand. . . .