But Therese would have done away with that chance, too.  There was nothing to be seen, though I held them up to the light with a beating heart.  It was written that not even that trace of her passage on the earth should remain with me; not to help but, as it were, to soothe the memory.  Then I lighted a cigarette and came downstairs slowly.  My unhappiness became dulled, as the grief of those who mourn for the dead gets dulled in the overwhelming sensation that everything is over, that a part of themselves is lost beyond recall taking with it all the savour of life.

I discovered Therese still on the very same spot of the floor, her hands folded over each other and facing my empty chair before which the spilled wine had soaked a large portion of the table-cloth.  She hadn’t moved at all.  She hadn’t even picked up the overturned glass.  But directly I appeared she began to speak in an ingratiating voice.

“If you have missed anything of yours upstairs, my dear young Monsieur, you mustn’t say it’s me.  You don’t know what our Rita is.”

“I wish to goodness,” I said, “that she had taken something.”

And again I became inordinately agitated as though it were my absolute fate to be everlastingly dying and reviving to the tormenting fact of her existence.  Perhaps she had taken something?  Anything.  Some small object.  I thought suddenly of a Rhenish-stone match-box.  Perhaps it was that.  I didn’t remember having seen it when upstairs.  I wanted to make sure at once.  At once.  But I commanded myself to sit still.

“And she so wealthy,” Therese went on.  “Even you with your dear generous little heart can do nothing for our Rita.  No man can do anything for her—­except perhaps one, but she is so evilly disposed towards him that she wouldn’t even see him, if in the goodness of his forgiving heart he were to offer his hand to her.  It’s her bad conscience that frightens her.  He loves her more than his life, the dear, charitable man.”

“You mean some rascal in Paris that I believe persecutes Dona Rita.  Listen, Mademoiselle Therese, if you know where he hangs out you had better let him have word to be careful I believe he, too, is mixed up in the Carlist intrigue.  Don’t you know that your sister can get him shut up any day or get him expelled by the police?”

Therese sighed deeply and put on a look of pained virtue.

“Oh, the hardness of her heart.  She tried to be tender with me.  She is awful.  I said to her, ’Rita, have you sold your soul to the Devil?’ and she shouted like a fiend:  ’For happiness!  Ha, ha, ha!’ She threw herself backwards on that couch in your room and laughed and laughed and laughed as if I had been tickling her, and she drummed on the floor with the heels of her shoes.  She is possessed.  Oh, my dear innocent young Monsieur, you have never seen anything like that.  That wicked girl who serves her rushed in with a tiny glass bottle and put it to her nose;