At the foot of the grand staircase in the lighted hall of the official building Réal suddenly thought: “And now I must go back to Escampobar.” Indeed he had to go to Escampobar because the false dispatches were there in the valise he had left behind. He couldn’t go back to the Admiral and explain that he had lost them. They would look on him as an unutterable idiot or a man gone mad. While walking to the quay where the naval boat was waiting for him he said to himself: “This, in truth, is my last visit for years--perhaps for life.” Going back in the boat, notwithstanding that the breeze was very light, he would not let the men take to the oars. He didn’t want to return before the women had gone to bed. He said to himself that the proper and honest thing to do was not to see Arlette again. He even managed to persuade himself that his uncontrolled impulse had had no meaning for that witless and unhappy creature. She had neither started, nor exclaimed; she had made no sign. She had remained passive and then she had backed away and sat down quietly. He could not even remember that she had coloured at all. As to himself, he had enough self-control to rise from the table and go out without looking at her again. Neither did she make a sign. What could startle that body without mind? She had made nothing of it, he thought with self-contempt. “Body without mind! Body without mind!” he repeated with angry derision directed at himself. And all at once he thought: “No. It isn’t that. All in her is mystery, seduction, enchantment. And then--what do I care for her mind!” This thought wrung from him a faint groan, so that the coxswain asked respectfully: “Are you in pain, mon lieutenant?” “It’s nothing,” he muttered and set his teeth with the desperation of a man under torture. While talking with Peyrol outside the house, the words “I won’t see her again,” and “body without mind,” rang through his head. By the time he had left Peyrol and walked up the stairs his endurance was absolutely at an end. All he wanted was to be alone. Going along the dark passage he noticed that the door of Catherine’s room was standing ajar. But that did not arrest his attention. He was approaching a state of insensibility. As he put his hand on the door handle of his room he said to himself: “It will soon be over!”