“I can’t imagine the devil inciting me to murder you, Therese,” I said, “and I didn’t like that ready way you took me for an example, as it were.  I suppose pretty near every lodger might be a potential murderer, but I expected to be made an exception.”

With the candle held a little below her face, with that face of one tone and without relief she looked more than ever as though she had come out of an old, cracked, smoky painting, the subject of which was altogether beyond human conception.  And she only compressed her lips.

“All right,” I said, making myself comfortable on a sofa after pulling off my boots.  “I suppose any one is liable to commit murder all of a sudden.  Well, have you got many murderers in the house?”

“Yes,” she said, “it’s pretty good.  Upstairs and downstairs,” she sighed.  “God sees to it.”

“And by the by, who is that grey-headed murderer in a tall hat whom I saw shepherding two girls into this house?”

She put on a candid air in which one could detect a little of her peasant cunning.

“Oh, yes.  They are two dancing girls at the Opera, sisters, as different from each other as I and our poor Rita.  But they are both virtuous and that gentleman, their father, is very severe with them.  Very severe indeed, poor motherless things.  And it seems to be such a sinful occupation.”

“I bet you make them pay a big rent, Therese.  With an occupation like that . . .”

She looked at me with eyes of invincible innocence and began to glide towards the door, so smoothly that the flame of the candle hardly swayed.  “Good-night,” she murmured.

“Good-night, Mademoiselle.”

Then in the very doorway she turned right round as a marionette would turn.

“Oh, you ought to know, my dear young Monsieur, that Mr. Blunt, the dear handsome man, has arrived from Navarre three days ago or more.  Oh,” she added with a priceless air of compunction, “he is such a charming gentleman.”

And the door shut after her.

CHAPTER IV

That night I passed in a state, mostly open-eyed, I believe, but always on the border between dreams and waking.  The only thing absolutely absent from it was the feeling of rest.  The usual sufferings of a youth in love had nothing to do with it.  I could leave her, go away from her, remain away from her, without an added pang or any augmented consciousness of that torturing sentiment of distance so acute that often it ends by wearing itself out in a few days.  Far or near was all one to me, as if one could never get any further but also never any nearer to her secret:  the state like that of some strange wild faiths that get hold of mankind with the cruel mystic grip of unattainable perfection, robbing them of both liberty and felicity on earth.  A faith presents one with some hope, though.  But I had no hope, and not even desire as a thing outside myself, that would come and go, exhaust or excite.  It was in me just like life was in me; that life of which a popular saying affirms that “it is sweet.”  For the general wisdom of mankind will always stop short on the limit of the formidable.