Two women in Marseilles committed suicide--they were followers, disciples, whatever you choose to call them. At any rate, they believed that where it was so simple a matter to die, it was foolish to stay on in a world that had treated them badly. One had lost a son, the other a lover. One shot herself; the other drowned herself in the canal. And both of them left letters addressed to Pilleux--enough to damn him in the eyes of authority. He was told that he might leave France, or take the consequences--a mild enough warning, but it worked. He dared not provoke an inquiry into his past. So he shipped on board a small Mediterranean steamer as fireman, and disappeared, no one knew where. Two years later he reappeared in Africa. Marie was with him. They were living in a small town on the rim of the desert near Biskra. Grimshaw occupied a native house--a mere hovel, flat-roofed, sun-baked, bare as a hermit's cell. Marie had hired herself out as _femme de chambre_ in the only hotel in the place. "I watched over him," she told me. "And believe me, _monsieur_, he needed care! He was thin as a ghost. He had starved more than once during those two years. He told me to go back to France, to seek happiness for myself. But for me happiness was with him. I laughed and stayed. I loved him--magnificently, _monsieur_." Grimshaw was writing again--in French--and his work began to appear in the Parisian journals, a strange poetic prose impregnated with mysticism. It was Grimshaw, sublimated. I saw it myself, although at that time I had not heard Waram's story. The French critics saw it. "This Pilleux is as picturesque as the English poet, Grimshaw. The style is identical." Waram saw it. He read everything that Pilleux wrote--with eagerness, with terror. Finally, driven by curiosity, he went to Paris, got Pilleux's address from the editor of _Gil Blas_, and started for Africa. Grimshaw is a misty figure at the last. You see him faintly--an exile, racially featureless, wearing a dirty white native robe, his face wrinkled by exposure to the sun, his eyes burning. Marie says that he prowled about the village at night, whispering to himself, his head thrown back, pointing his beard at the stars. He wrote in the cool hours before dawn, and later, when the village quivered in heat fumes and he slept, Marie posted what he had written to Paris. One day he took her head between his hands and said very gently: "Why don't you get a lover? Take life while you can." "You say there is eternal life," she protested. "_N'en doutez-pas_! But you must be rich in knowledge. Put flowers in your hair. And place your palms against a lover's palms and kiss him with generosity, _ma petite_. I am not a man; I am a shadow." Marie slipped her arms around him and, standing on tiptoe, put her lips against his. "_Je t'aime_," she said simply.