He listened to his own words with amazement and annoyance. Thérèse smiled, then looked at him fixedly and gravely. At last! Bernard had asked a question, the very question that would have been the first to come into Thérèse’s mind had she been in his place. That confession, so carefully prepared, in the victoria along the Nizan road, and then in the little local train to Saint Clair, that patient meditation in the darkness, her efforts to reach the mainspring of her act,--all that exhausting cross-examination of her conscience, was perhaps on the point of bearing fruit. She had, unconsciously, disturbed Bernard’s peace of mind. She had confused him: and now he was questioning her like some one who is in doubt, and cannot see clearly. He was less self-assured, and therefore more sympathetic. Thérèse gazed at this unknown creature with a kind, almost maternal expression. However, she replied in a bantering tone: “Didn’t you know it was to get your pines? Yes, I wanted to be in sole possession of your pines.” He shrugged his shoulders. “If I ever did believe that, I don’t believe it any more. Why did you do it? You might as well tell me now.” Her eyes stared into vacancy: on that pavement, on the bank of that stream of mud and huddled human bodies, before taking the plunge and joining in the struggle, or allowing herself to sink beneath the surface, she saw a gleam like the light of breaking dawn: she envisaged a return to the sad and desolate country,--a whole life passed in meditation and striving after perfection, in the silence of Argelouse ... the adventure of the soul, the quest for God.... A Moorish vendor of carpets and glass necklaces thought she was smiling at him, and came up to her: and she said in the same bantering tone: “I was going to answer: ‘I don’t know why I did it’; but now I believe I do know. Perhaps it was to see a look of uneasiness, curiosity, in those eyes of yours: the expression I have noticed in them for the last moment or two:--just to upset your self-satisfaction, in fact!” “I suppose you can’t be serious even now,” he grumbled, in a tone which reminded Thérèse of her honeymoon. “Do tell me: why did you?” She smiled no more, and in her turn asked a question: “I suppose a man like you, Bernard, always knows why he does a thing?” “Naturally ... why, of course ... at least, I think so.” “Indeed, I should so have wished you to know everything. If you only knew how I have tortured myself to try and see clearly.... But, you see, all the reasons I could have given you,--the moment I had uttered them, they would have seemed unconvincing....” “But,” said Bernard, impatiently, “there must have been a day when you made up your mind ... when you actually did the thing?” “Yes, the day of the great fire at Mano.”