The girl was quite right when she had said, as she so often did to Thérèse, then a sceptical, and mocking schoolgirl: “You can’t think how relieved you feel when you have confessed and been forgiven,--when you can begin all over again with a clean slate.” Indeed, the moment Thérèse had made up her mind to tell the whole story she did feel a sort of delicious relief. She would tell Bernard everything: she would say.... Yes, but what should she say? How should she begin? Could any words express that confused succession of desires, resolves, and impulses? “How do people behave,” she thought, “when they acknowledge their crimes? I don’t acknowledge mine: I didn’t want to commit it. I don’t know what I did want. I never knew the meaning of that dreadful force within me, and yet outside me: and I was myself horrified at all the destruction it left behind.” A smoky oil lamp lit up the plaster walls of the Nizan station and a carriage outside it: and all about them gathered the encompassing darkness. A train standing in the station whistled and hooted dismally. Gardère took Thérèse’s bag and again stared at her greedily. His wife must have told him to watch carefully how she was looking and behaving. For the benefit of Monsieur Larroque’s coachman Thérèse instinctively assumed that smile that made people say: “Never mind whether she is pretty or plain, you cannot resist her charm.” She asked him to take her ticket, because she did not like to cross the waiting-room, where two farmers’ wives were sitting with baskets on their knees swaying to the rhythm of their knitting-needles. When he brought back the ticket she told him to keep the change. He touched his cap, and then, gathering up the reins, he turned to have a last, long look at his master’s daughter.