From his mind now there faded the memory of her face, the memory of her hands, the memory of her voice even. With every week, with every month, with the year, she was gone. Like a lost thought, or a lost bar of music, she was gone. She had been there, but she was gone. The loss was a terrible one. To lose one who was alive was much. But to lose one who was dead was unbelievable, horrible ... to lose the sun ... forever.... He decided he could go back to the Prado of Marseilles, where first he had met her, where she would of all places have kept a tryst with him. There was no risk. The folk of the sea come and go so easily, so invisibly, and French law bothers itself little about the killing of a woman of evil repute.... One of the risks of the trade, they would say. Even had there been a risk he would have gone. He went. It was a dark night, a night of wind with the waves lashing the shore. A night of all nights to keep a tryst with a dead woman. Immense privacy of darkness and howling winds and lashing waves. With awe he went there, as a shaken Catholic might enter a cathedral, dubious of the mystery of the eucharist, expecting some silent word, some invisible sign from the tabernacle.... He went with bowed head.... She never came. He concentrated until all faded away, even the night, the wind, the insistent waters. He might have been standing on a solitary rock in an infinite dark sea, to which there was no shore. Asking, pleading, willing for her.... But she never came.... And it suddenly became inevitable to him that she would not come; and slowly, as a man comes slowly out of a drug into consciousness, he came back into the world of lights and laughter and sodden things. And turning on his heel without a look, he went away.... He never called to her again.... He thought over her often enough, and she had never been real, he decided. His mother and his wife had been real. They were their own dimensions. But she was something he had made in his head, as an author may create a character. She was a hallucination. And she had never been with him after death; that had been a mirage in the hinterland of the mind. And he asked: Who was she, anyway? She was a woman who said she loved him, might even have believed it. Women under stress believe so many things. A little anger, a little passion, a little melancholy, and things resolve themselves into so many differences of color and line. And what standard of truth is there? Suppose he were to tell any man of the world of the occurrence, and to ask who she was, what she was, and what he had been to her. They would have said it was simple. She was a harlot of Marseilles, and he was her _amant de coeur_. But the beauty of it! he would have objected. All the beauty was in yourself. Or as they would have put it: All imagination! What a snare it all was, and what was truth? How much better off a man was if he had never anything to do with them, and yet....