I take some hesitant steps in the tiny vestibule, which is lighted by the glass door to the kitchen, wherein I hear the drip of water.  I see a room whose curtains invest it with broidered light.  There is a bed in it, with a cover of sky-blue satinette shining like the blue of a chromo.  It is Marie’s room!  Her gray silk hat, rose-trimmed, hangs from a nail on the flowery paper.  She has not worn it since my aunt’s death; and alongside hang black dresses.  I enter this bright blue sanctuary, inhabited only by a cold and snow-like light, and orderly and chaste as a picture.

My hand goes out like a thief’s.  I touch, I stroke these dresses, which are wont to touch Marie.  I turn again to the blue-veiled bed.  On a whatnot there are books, and their titles invite me; for where her thoughts dwell, the things which occupy her mind—­but I leave them.  I would rather go near her bed.  With a movement at once mad, frightened and trembling, I lift the quilts that clothe it and my gaze enters it, and my knees lean trembling on the edge of this great lifeless thing, which, alone among dead things, is one of soft and supple flesh.

* * * * * *

My customary life continues and my work is always the same.  I make notes, by the way, of Crillon’s honest trivialities; of Brisbille’s untimely outbursts; of the rumors anent the Pocard scheme, and the progress of the Association of Avengers, a society to promote national awakening, founded by Monsieur Joseph Boneas.  The same complex and monotonous existence bears me along as it does everybody.  But since that tragic night when my sorrow was transformed into joy at the lyke-wake in the old room, in truth the world is no longer what it was.  People and things appear to me shadowy and distant when I go out into the current of the crowds; when I am dressing in my room and decide that I look well in black; when I sit up late at my table in the sunshine of hope.  Now and again the memory of my aunt comes bodily back to me.  Sometimes I hear people pronounce the name of Marie.  My body starts when it hears them say “Marie,” who know not what they say.  And there are moments when our separation throbs so warmly that I do not know whether she is here or absent.

* * * * * *

During this walk that we have just had together the summer and the sweetness of living have weighed more than ever on my shoulders.  Her huge home, which is such a swarming hive at certain times, is now immensely empty in the labyrinth of its dark stairs and the landings, whence issue the narrow closed streets of its corridors, and where in the corners taps drip upon drain-stones.  Our immense—­our naked solitude pervades us.  An exquisite emotion takes hold of me while we are slowly climbing the steep and methodical way.  There is something human in the stairway; in the inevitable shapes of its spiral and its steps cut