"Ah, he's waiting," he said to himself. A gleam of vanity, of triumph over the discarded, humiliated one, leaped up fiercely within him and ended all the lingering, bitter memories. "Then you care?" she said, resting her head on his shoulder that he might not see she had read such a thought. "Care?" he cried. He had surrendered. Now it was necessary to be convinced. "Why, when I received your letter I--I was wild. I wanted to do murder." "Jackie!" "I was like a madman--everything was gone--nothing was left." "Oh, Jack, how I have made you suffer!" "Suffer? Yes, I have suffered!" Overcome by the returning pain of the memory, he dropped into a chair, trying to control his voice. "Yes, I have suffered!" "Forgive me!" she said, slipping on her knees beside him, and burying her head in his lap. "I was out of my head--I don't know what I did, what I said. It was as though a bomb had exploded. My life was wrecked, shattered--nothing left." He felt the grief again, even more acutely. He suffered for what he had suffered. "Jack, I never really could have _abandoned_ you," she cried bitterly. She raised her eyes toward him and suddenly took notice of the time-tables that lay clutched in his hands. "Oh, you were going away!" He nodded, incapable of speech. "You were running away?" "I was running away--to forget--to bury myself!" "Oh, Jack!" "There was nothing here. It was all a blank! I was running away--to bury myself!" At the memory of that miserable hopeless moment, in which he had resolved on flight, the tears, no longer to be denied, came dripping down his cheeks. THE LIE I For some time they had ceased to speak, too oppressed with the needless anguish of this their last night. At their feet the tiny shining windows of Etretat were dropping back into the night, as though sinking under the rise of that black, mysterious flood that came luminously from the obscure regions of the faint sky. Overhead, the swollen August stars had faded before the pale flush that, toward the lighthouse on the cliff, heralded the red rise of the moon. He held himself a little apart, the better to seize every filmy detail of the strange woman who had come inexplicably into his life, watching the long, languorous arms stretched out into an impulsive clasp, the dramatic harmony of the body, the brooding head, the soft, half-revealed line of the neck. The troubling alchemy of the night, that before his eyes slowly mingled the earth with the sea and the sea with the sky, seemed less mysterious than this woman whose body was as immobile as the stillness in her soul.