There are dead leaves on the stone slab.  They come from the chestnuts yonder.  They fell on the ground and yet they have flown away as far as the seat.

On this seat—­where she came to me for the first time, which was once so important to us that it seemed as if the background of things all about us had been created by us—­we sit down to-day, after we have vainly sought in nature the traces of our transit.

The landscape is peaceful, simple, empty; it fills us with a great quivering.  Marie is so sad and so simple that you can see her thought.

I have leaned forward, my elbows on my knees.  I have contemplated the gravel at my feet; and suddenly I start, for I understand that my eyes were looking for the marks of our footsteps, in spite of the stone, in spite of the sand.

After the solemnity of a long silence, Marie’s face takes on a look of defeat, and suddenly she begins to cry.  The tears which fill her—­for one always weeps in full, drop on to her knees.  And through her sobs there fall from her wet lips words almost shapeless, but desperate and fierce, as a burst of forced laughter.

“It’s all over!” she cries.

* * * * * *

I have put my arm round her waist, and I am shaken by the sorrow which agitates her chest and throat, and sometimes shakes her rudely, the sorrow which does not belong to me, which belongs to no one, and is like a divinity.

She becomes composed.  I take her hand.  In a weak voice she calls some memories up—­this and that—­and “one morning——­” She applies herself to it and counts them.  I speak, too, gently.  We question each other.  “Do you remember?”—­“Oh, yes.”  And when some more precise and intimate detail prompts the question we only reply, “A little.”  Our separation and the great happenings past which the world has whirled have made the past recoil and shaped a deep ditch.  Nothing has changed; but when we look we see.

Once, after we had recalled to each other an enchanted summer evening, I said, “We loved each other,” and she answered, “I remember.”

I call her by her name, in a low voice, so as to draw her out of the dumbness into which she is falling.

She listens to me, and then says, placidly, despairingly, “’Marie,’—­you used to say it like that.  I can’t realize that I had the same name.”

A few moments later, as we talked of something else, she said to me at last, “Ah, that day we had dreams of travel, about our plans—­you were there, sitting by my side.”

In those former times we lived.  Now we hardly live any more, since we have lived.  They who we were are dead, for we are here.  Her glances come to me, but they do not join again the two surviving voids that we are; her look does not wipe out our widowhood, nor change anything.  And I, I am too imbued with clear-sighted simplicity and truth to answer “no” when it is “yes.”  In this moment by my side Marie is like me.