The time had now come when she must face the act she had committed. What explanation should she give to Bernard? She could only remind him, point by point, how the thing happened. It was the day of the great fire at Mano. Various men came into the dining-room where the family were having a hasty lunch. Some said that the fire seemed a very long way from Saint Clair: others insisted that the tocsin should be rung. The torrid air was full of the smell of burning resin and the face of the sun looked dull and tarnished. Thérèse saw Bernard once more, sitting with his head turned, listening to Balion’s report, and his strong hairy hand poised absent-mindedly above the glass as the “Fowler’s drops” fell into the water. He swallowed the physic at a gulp before Thérèse, who was stupefied with the heat, had thought to warn him that he had doubled his usual dose. Every one but herself had left the table; she stayed on, cracking almonds, indifferent, untouched by all this anxiety, without interest in the tragedy, as indeed in any tragedy that was not her own. The tocsin did not ring. Bernard came back at last: “For once you were right not to be anxious: the fire is over towards Mano.... Have I taken my drops?” he asked, and without waiting for the answer he began again to pour them out into his glass. She said nothing, no doubt from laziness or fatigue; what was her intention in that instant? “I couldn’t have really meant not to answer.” * * * * * And yet that night, when Doctor Pédemay questioned her on the incidents of the day, as she stood by Bernard’s bedside, where he lay vomiting and groaning, she did not mention what she had seen at table. It would, however, have been easy, without compromising herself, to have reminded the doctor about the arsenic which Bernard was taking. She might have said something of this sort: “I did not think about it at the moment.... We were all distracted by the fire ... but I would swear, now, that he took a double dose....” She remained dumb: she did not even feel moved to speak. The deed which during lunch had been unwitting began then to emerge from the depths of her being,--as yet incomplete, but half-endured with consciousness.