Madame de Cadour turned to her old friend and said: 

“Will you come with me, Monsieur d’Apreval?”

He bowed with a smile, and with all the gallantry of former years: 

“I will go wherever you go,” he replied.

“Very well, then, go and get a sunstroke,” Monsieur de Cadour said; and he went back to the Hotel des Bains to lie down for an hour or two.

As soon as they were alone, the old lady and her old companion set off, and she said to him in a low voice, squeezing his hand: 

“At last! at last!”

“You are mad,” he said in a whisper.  “I assure you that you are mad.  Think of the risk you are running.  If that man—­”

She started.

“Oh!  Henri, do not say that man, when you are speaking of him.”

“Very well,” he said abruptly, “if our son guesses anything, if he has any suspicions, he will have you, he will have us both in his power.  You have got on without seeing him for the last forty years.  What is the matter with you to-day?”

They had been going up the long street that leads from the sea to the town, and now they turned to the right, to go to Etretat.  The white road stretched in front of them under a blaze of brilliant sunshine, so they went on slowly in the burning heat.  She had taken her old friend’s arm, and was looking straight in front of her, with a fixed and haunted gaze, and at last she said: 

“And so you have not seen him again, either?”

“No, never.”

“Is it possible?”

“My dear friend, do not let us begin that discussion again.  I have a wife and children and you have a husband, so we both of us have much to fear from other people’s opinion.”

She did not reply; she was thinking of her long past youth and of many sad things that had occurred.  How well she recalled all the details of their early friendship, his smiles, the way he used to linger, in order to watch her until she was indoors.  What happy days they were, the only really delicious days she had ever enjoyed, and how quickly they were over!

And then—­her discovery—­of the penalty she paid!  What anguish!

Of that journey to the South, that long journey, her sufferings, her constant terror, that secluded life in the small, solitary house on the shores of the Mediterranean, at the bottom of a garden, which she did not venture to leave.  How well she remembered those long days which she spent lying under an orange tree, looking up at the round, red fruit, amid the green leaves.  How she used to long to go out, as far as the sea, whose fresh breezes came to her over the wall, and whose small waves she could hear lapping on the beach.  She dreamed of its immense blue expanse sparkling under the sun, with the white sails of the small vessels, and a mountain on the horizon.  But she did not dare to go outside the gate.  Suppose anybody had recognized her!

And those days of waiting, those last days of misery and expectation!  The impending suffering, and then that terrible night!  What misery she had endured, and what a night it was!  How she had groaned and screamed!  She could still see the pale face of her lover, who kissed her hand every moment, and the clean-shaven face of the doctor and the nurse’s white cap.