We had not given up our walks, but I had abruptly shortened them, without saying why. I discovered a thousand round-about ways in order to avoid a rocky or slippery road; I pushed aside the branches that grew across the paths with a care that could not fail to arouse suspicion. Sometimes, in the course of a little excursion, feeling that we had gone far from the village, I suddenly experienced an overpowering terror which made me silent and stupid. I had given up chess, excusing myself on the ground of fatigue, which soon indeed was no longer feigned. A time came when all these emotions seriously affected my health. I kept my bed for several days without being at all rested. I would rather have been left to myself absolutely; but the thought of Dauche going out alone and not able to take care of himself was unendurable. I could not imagine that the fatality was to take place without my being present, because I was always expectant, waiting.... So he always stayed with me, and used to pass the time by reading out to me. I often wished to stop him and, being unable to say that I felt anxious on his account, I complained of my head. The thing is unbelievable. It was I who looked like the man who was doomed, and it was he who seemed to be in full possession of his strength. I was right in what I said: I was undergoing on his behalf the pangs of death. One night, during his first sleep, he uttered a kind of moan so strangely animal in quality, that at once I was on my feet, and I gazed at him for a long time in the glow of the night-light. The emotion I felt that night was mingled with something like an intense desire for freedom. I was horrified to discover that my sick soul not only waited for the inevitable thing, but was dominated by a longing for the end. * * * * * I got up about the beginning of December, and our first walk was in the pinewoods that clustered on the sandy hills south of the main road from Rheims to Soissons. The afternoon was coming to a close. A wild west wind raged through this war-scarred valley which, from ancient times, had borne the ravaging ebb and flow of invasion. We were walking side by side, feeling rather chilled and silent, given up to those formless thoughts that find no expression in the spoken word and which are of the very colour and fabric of the soul. We got rather warm in climbing a hill, and when we got to the top I suggested we should sit and rest ourselves on the trunk of a beech tree that lay mutilated on the ground, and from which oozed a yellow liquid streaked with purple. I was worn out, without hope, without courage, having lost all interest in my doings, in the condition of a man whose will fails him and who gives up the agonising struggle. Is it possible that there can be, between two beings, relations so mysteriously intimate? Is it true that it was I who on that day gave up the struggle?