Just once, taken by surprise, she gave way before their assault. It was one afternoon, shortly before the movers were to come. Her aunt was at church and Marc was at Sylvie's. Annette, alone in the Boulogne house, where everything spoke of their approaching departure, was kneeling on a half-rolled rug, folding up a tapestry that had been taken down. Occupied with her task, while her active hands came and went, her head was busy calculating about the new arrangements. But she still had room for dreams; for her eye, floating for an instant far from the present vision, fastened in its mistiness upon a design in the tapestry which her hands were rolling up: it recognized this design. A motif of pale flowers, almost worn away; butterflies' wings, detached petals? It mattered little; but Annette's eyes as a child had fallen there, and on this canvas they had embroidered the tapestry of the days that had fled. And this tapestry had suddenly emerged from the night. Annette's hands ceased to wander; her mind, for one moment more, persisted in repeating the figures of which it had lost the thread, then was still. And Annette, letting herself slip down upon the floor, with her forehead on the roll of the rug and her face in her hands, lay there with her knees drawn up, abandoned herself to the wind and the flood, set sail. . . . She did not voyage towards any particular country. . . . Such a mass of memories--lived? dreamed?--how distinguish between them? Dizzy symphony of a moment of silence! It contained much more than the substance of a life. In active thought, the consciousness, when it believes it takes possession of our inner world, only seizes the crest of the wave at the moment when the sun-ray gilds it. Reverie alone perceives the moving abyss and its torrential rhythm, those innumerable drops, scudding along on the wind of the ages, seeds of thought of the beings from whom we spring and who will spring from us, that formidable chorus of hopes and regrets whose trembling hands stretch out towards the past or the future. Indefinable harmony that forms the tissue of an illuminated second, and that sometimes a shock is enough to awaken. A bouquet of pale flowers had just evoked it in Annette. When she pulled herself together, after a long silence, she rose hastily, and with hands that were suddenly awkward, hasty, trembling, she finished folding up the tapestry without looking at it. She did not quite finish it, she threw it into a box, incompletely rolled, and fled from the room. . . . No, she did not want to stay with these thoughts! It was better to escape from them. Later she would have time enough to regret the past, when she would herself belong to the past . . . later, in the twilight of her life. For the moment, she was too full of the future, she must see it through. Her dreams lay ahead of her. "I don't want to know what is behind me; I must not turn around."