“True, but I wanted two of you. I chose you because your name is Jean, like his. Otherwise I should have been capable of making a slip in the name when I was talking to him. I am very absent-minded.” * * * * * And then she drew closer to the new Jean. She was still more changed in voice and face. With the languorous, lisping, coaxing inflections of the creole accent she murmured childish words to him, and offered him her lips, still warm from the spahi’s kisses. * * * * * But her lover had caught sight of the pale face of Jean Peyral gazing at them through the half-open door, and for all reply he pointed Cora towards him with his hand. The spahi was standing there, motionless, petrified, fixing his wide, haggard eyes upon them. When he found that they in their turn were looking at him, he simply stepped back into the shadow. Cora had advanced towards him, with the hideous expression of an animal disturbed in its love-making; this woman frightened him; she was almost near enough to touch him. She shut her door with a furious gesture; shot a bolt behind it ... and all was over. Through the disguise of the polished _élégante_ the mulatto woman, grand-daughter of a slave, had betrayed herself again with her appalling cynicism. She felt neither remorse, nor fear, nor pity.... The coloured woman and her lover heard a noise as of a body falling heavily to the ground, a loud sinister noise in the silence of the night—and then later, towards morning, a sob behind that door, and a rustling sound as of hands fumbling in the dark. The spahi had risen to his feet, and feeling his way, he went out into the night. XIII Walking on aimlessly, like a drunken man, sinking ankle-deep in the sand of the deserted streets, Jean came to Guet n’dar, the negro town with its thousands of pointed huts. In the darkness he stumbled over men and women who lay sleeping on the ground rolled in pieces of white cotton, seeming to him like a population of phantoms. He walked on and on, feeling as if he had lost his senses. Soon he found himself on the shore of the sombre sea. The breakers were roaring loudly. With a shudder of horror he distinguished swarms of crabs, fleeing before his footsteps, in solid masses. He remembered to have seen a corpse that had been washed up on the beach, torn and excarnated by them. He had no wish for such a death. Nevertheless these breakers attracted him; he felt himself fascinated, as it were, by those great, glistening volutes, already gleaming silvery in the doubtful light of the morning, curling over all along the vast beaches, farther than the sight could reach. It seemed to him that their coolness would be grateful to his burning head, and that in their kindly waters death would appear less cruel. * * * * *