Small objects of no value have the secret of sticking to a man in an astonishing way.  I had nearly lost my liberty and even my life, I had lost my ship, a money-belt full of gold, I had lost my companions, had parted from my friend; my occupation, my only link with life, my touch with the sea, my cap and jacket were gone—­but a small penknife and a latchkey had never parted company with me.  With the latchkey I opened the door of refuge.  The hall wore its deaf-and-dumb air, its black-and-white stillness.

The sickly gas-jet still struggled bravely with adversity at the end of the raised silver arm of the statuette which had kept to a hair’s breadth its graceful pose on the toes of its left foot; and the staircase lost itself in the shadows above.  Therese was parsimonious with the lights.  To see all this was surprising.  It seemed to me that all the things I had known ought to have come down with a crash at the moment of the final catastrophe on the Spanish coast.  And there was Therese herself descending the stairs, frightened but plucky.  Perhaps she thought that she would be murdered this time for certain.  She had a strange, unemotional conviction that the house was particularly convenient for a crime.  One could never get to the bottom of her wild notions which she held with the stolidity of a peasant allied to the outward serenity of a nun.  She quaked all over as she came down to her doom, but when she recognized me she got such a shock that she sat down suddenly on the lowest step.  She did not expect me for another week at least, and, besides, she explained, the state I was in made her blood take “one turn.”

Indeed my plight seemed either to have called out or else repressed her true nature.  But who had ever fathomed her nature!  There was none of her treacly volubility.  There were none of her “dear young gentlemans” and “poor little hearts” and references to sin.  In breathless silence she ran about the house getting my room ready, lighting fires and gas-jets and even hauling at me to help me up the stairs.  Yes, she did lay hands on me for that charitable purpose.  They trembled.  Her pale eyes hardly left my face.  “What brought you here like this?” she whispered once.

“If I were to tell you, Mademoiselle Therese, you would see there the hand of God.”

She dropped the extra pillow she was carrying and then nearly fell over it.  “Oh, dear heart,” she murmured, and ran off to the kitchen.

I sank into bed as into a cloud and Therese reappeared very misty and offering me something in a cup.  I believe it was hot milk, and after I drank it she took the cup and stood looking at me fixedly.  I managed to say with difficulty:  “Go away,” whereupon she vanished as if by magic before the words were fairly out of my mouth.  Immediately afterwards the sunlight forced through the slats of the jalousies its diffused glow, and Therese was there again as if by magic, saying in a distant voice:  “It’s midday”. . . Youth will have its rights.  I had slept like a stone for seventeen hours.