At the corner, of the two boulevards was a glowing cafe, the Cafe du Dome, with a row of chairs and little tables in front of its windows.  And at one of these little tables sat a man, gazing absently at a green glass in a white saucer.  I had almost gone past him when some instinct prompted me to the bravery of looking at him again.  He was a stoutish man, apparently aged about forty-five, very fair, with a puffed face and melancholy eyes.  And then it was as though someone had shot me in the breast.  It was as if I must fall down and die—­as if the sensations which I experienced were too acute—­too elemental for me to support.  I have never borne a child, but I imagine that the woman who becomes a mother may feel as I felt then, staggered at hitherto unsuspected possibilities of sensation.  I stopped.  I clung to the nearest table.  There was ice on my shuddering spine, and a dew on my forehead.

‘Magda!’ breathed the man.

He had raised his eyes to mine.

It was Diaz, after ten years.

At first I had not recognised him.  Instead of ten, he seemed twenty years older.  I searched in his features for the man I had known, as the returned traveller searches the scene of his childhood for remembered landmarks.  Yes, it was Diaz, though time had laid a heavy hand on him.  The magic of his eyes was not effaced, and when he smiled youth reappeared.

‘It is I,’ I murmured.

He got up, and in doing so shook the table, and his glass was overturned, and scattered itself in fragments on the asphalte.  At the noise a waiter ran out of the cafe, and Diaz, blushing and obviously making a great effort at self-control, gave him an order.

‘I should have known you anywhere,’ said Diaz to me, taking my hand, as the waiter went.

The ineptitude of the speech was such that I felt keenly sorry for him.  I was not in the least hurt.  My sympathy enveloped him.  The position was so difficult, and he had seemed so pathetic, sitting there alone on the pavement of the vast nocturnal boulevard, so weighed down by sadness, that I wanted to comfort him and soothe him, and to restore him to all the brilliancy of his first period.  It appeared to me unjust and cruel that the wheels of life should have crushed him too.  And so I said, smiling as well as I could: 

‘And I you.’

‘Won’t you sit down here?’ he suggested, avoiding my eyes.

And thus I found myself seated outside a cafe, at night, conspicuous for all Montparnasse to see.  We never know what may lie in store for us at the next turning of existence.

‘Then I am not much changed, you think?’ he ventured, in an anxious tone.

‘No,’ I lied.  ‘You are perhaps a little stouter.  That’s all.’

How hard it was to talk!  How lamentably self-conscious we were!  How unequal to the situation!  We did not know what to say.

‘You are far more beautiful than ever you were,’ he said, looking at me for an instant.  ‘You are a woman; you were a girl—­then.’