The night was cold, dull, grey; there was a feeling of rain in the air. To my amazement, I found no one under the oak; I walked several times round it, went up to the edge of the wood, turned back again, peered anxiously into the darkness.... All was emptiness. I waited a little, then several times I uttered the name, Alice, each time a little louder,... but she did not appear. I felt sad, almost sick at heart; my previous apprehensions vanished; I could not resign myself to the idea that my companion would not come back to me again. ‘Alice! Alice! come! Can it be you will not come?’ I shouted, for the last time. A crow, who had been waked by my voice, suddenly darted upwards into a tree-top close by, and catching in the twigs, fluttered his wings.... But Alice did not appear. With downcast head, I turned homewards. Already I could discern the black outlines of the willows on the pond’s edge, and the light in my window peeped out at me through the apple-trees in the orchard--peeped at me, and hid again, like the eye of some man keeping watch on me--when suddenly I heard behind me the faint swish of the rapidly parted air, and something at once embraced and snatched me upward, as a buzzard pounces on and snatches up a quail.... It was Alice sweeping down upon me. I felt her cheek against my cheek, her enfolding arm about my body, and like a cutting cold her whisper pierced to my ear, ‘Here I am.’ I was frightened and delighted both at once.... We flew at no great height above the ground. ‘You did not mean to come to-day?’ I said. ‘And you were dull without me? You love me? Oh, you are mine!’ The last words of Alice confused me.... I did not know what to say. ‘I was kept,’ she went on; ‘I was watched.’ ‘Who could keep you?’ ‘Where would you like to go?’ inquired Alice, as usual not answering my question. ‘Take me to Italy--to that lake, you remember.’ Alice turned a little away, and shook her head in refusal. At that point I noticed for the first time that she had ceased to be transparent. And her face seemed tinged with colour; there was a faint glow of red over its misty whiteness. I glanced at her eyes ... and felt a pang of dread; in those eyes something was astir--with the slow, continuous, malignant movement of the benumbed snake, twisting and turning as the sun begins to thaw it. ‘Alice,’ I cried, ‘who are you? Tell me who you are.’ Alice simply shrugged her shoulders. I felt angry ... I longed to punish her; and suddenly the idea occurred to me to tell her to fly with me to Paris. ‘That’s the place for you to be jealous,’ I thought. ‘Alice,’ I said aloud, ‘you are not afraid of big towns--Paris, for instance?’ ‘No.’ ‘Not even those parts where it is as light as in the boulevards?’ ‘It is not the light of day.’ ‘Good; then take me at once to the Boulevard des Italiens.’