“Nothing worse than in this,” said Susan.

Her mother, umbrella in hand and trailing the shawl over the floor, groaned profoundly.

“I must go to the priest,” she burst out passionately.  “I do not know whether you even speak the truth!  You are a horrible woman.  They will find you anywhere.  You may stay here—­or go.  There is no room for you in this world.”

Ready now to depart, she yet wandered aimlessly about the room, putting the bottles on the shelf, trying to fit with trembling hands the covers on cardboard boxes.  Whenever the real sense of what she had heard emerged for a second from the haze of her thoughts she would fancy that something had exploded in her brain without, unfortunately, bursting her head to pieces—­which would have been a relief.  She blew the candles out one by one without knowing it, and was horribly startled by the darkness.  She fell on a bench and began to whimper.  After a while she ceased, and sat listening to the breathing of her daughter, whom she could hardly see, still and upright, giving no other sign of life.  She was becoming old rapidly at last, during those minutes.  She spoke in tones unsteady, cut about by the rattle of teeth, like one shaken by a deadly cold fit of ague.

“I wish you had died little.  I will never dare to show my old head in the sunshine again.  There are worse misfortunes than idiot children.  I wish you had been born to me simple—­like your own. . . .”

She saw the figure of her daughter pass before the faint and livid clearness of a window.  Then it appeared in the doorway for a second, and the door swung to with a clang.  Madame Levaille, as if awakened by the noise from a long nightmare, rushed out.

“Susan!” she shouted from the doorstep.

She heard a stone roll a long time down the declivity of the rocky beach above the sands.  She stepped forward cautiously, one hand on the wall of the house, and peered down into the smooth darkness of the empty bay.  Once again she cried—­

“Susan!  You will kill yourself there.”

The stone had taken its last leap in the dark, and she heard nothing now.  A sudden thought seemed to strangle her, and she called no more.  She turned her back upon the black silence of the pit and went up the lane towards Ploumar, stumbling along with sombre determination, as if she had started on a desperate journey that would last, perhaps, to the end of her life.  A sullen and periodic clamour of waves rolling over reefs followed her far inland between the high hedges sheltering the gloomy solitude of the fields.