The train was not yet made up. In the old days, at the beginning of the long vacation, or on the way back to school, Thérèse Larroque and Anne de la Trave enjoyed this stop at Nizan station. They used to eat ham and eggs at the local inn and walk with their arms round each other’s waists down that road that looked so dark this evening: but in those vanished years Thérèse always saw it white under the moonlight. And how they used to laugh at their elongated shadows as they melted into each other! They talked, of course, about their mistresses and their school-friends, one standing up for her convent and the other for her school. “Anne!” Thérèse uttered the name aloud in the darkness. She must begin by telling Bernard about Anne. Her Bernard was one of the most precise of men: he classified all emotions, kept them rigidly apart, and ignored the complicated network of sensations that unites them. How could he follow her into those shadowy places where she had lived and suffered? Yet she must try to make him: the only thing to do, when she went into the room later on, would be to sit on the edge of the bed and take him, step by step, through the whole story until he should stop her and say: “Now I understand; get up; I forgive you.” She felt her way through the station-master’s garden where she could smell the chrysanthemums without seeing them. The first class compartment was empty, and in any case the lamp was much too dim to reveal her face. She could not read: but Thérèse must have found any novel insipid in comparison with the terrible story of her life. She might die of shame, despair, remorse, or exhaustion,--but of boredom, never. She sat back in her corner and closed her eyes. It was incredible that a woman of her intelligence should not be able to make the tragedy intelligible. When her confession was over, Bernard would of course raise her to her feet and say: “Go in peace, Thérèse: be of good comfort: deeds that are over and done shall never part us now, we will wait for death together in this house at Argelouse. I am thirsty: go down into the kitchen and make me a glass of orangeade: I shall drink it at a draught; no matter what it looks like, nor even if it tastes like my morning chocolate of those days! Do you remember how sick I used to be, darling; and how kindly you held my head, as you stared at that dreadful greenish liquid? You were never frightened when I fainted. And yet how pale you were that night when I noticed that my legs had gone dead and stiff! I was shivering, do you remember? And that old fool Doctor Pédemay who was so astonished because my temperature was so low and my pulse so feverish....” “No,” Thérèse thought to herself, “he won’t have understood. I shall have to begin at the very beginning.”