“But one day per’aps?  You love someone, hein?” (Had she wilfully forgotten?  She studied his face with a wicked curiosity.  He could not answer her.) “Give it ’er then—­Monsieur Robert—­pour me faire plaisir.”

“There is no one to give it to.”

“But there was——­”

He tried desperately to regain the old sarcastic inflection.

“No doubt it seems inevitable to you.”

“Tell me about ’er. Voyons, if you can’t keep me alive, Monsieur mon docteur, you might at least amuse me.”

“There is nothing to tell.  I will give you something that will make you sleep.”

“I do not want to sleep.  That is bad, ugly sleep that you give me.  So you quarrel.  What you quarrel about, Monsieur Robert?  Another woman?”

The sheer, grotesque truth of it drove him to an ironical assent.

“As you say, another woman——­”

“Oh, la la!  So there was once upon a time a ver’ serious young man who forget to be quite serious. Voyons—­you ’ave to tell me all now—­just as I tell you.”

He turned on her then.  In five brief, savage sentences he had told her of Frances and the woman in the hospital.  And when he had done he read her face with its tolerant good-humour, and the full enormity of it all burst over him like a flood of crude light.  He turned away from her stammering: 

“I’ve no business here—­I’ve no business to be your doctor—­or anyone’s doctor.  I think I must be going mad.”

She shook her head.

“No—­no—­only too serious, mon pauvre jeune homme.  But I like your—­your Francey.  I think she and I be good friends some’ow.  She would see things ’ow I see them.”

(He thought crazily: 

“Yes, she would sit by you and look over your shoulder at your rotten life, and say:  ’So that’s the way it seems to you?  And you’re right.  It’s been a splendid joke.’”)

“One of these days you be friends again too.  And then you give ’er my leetle pearl.  Say it’s from Gyp, who is sorry she made so much trouble.  Why not?  You think it make her sad?  It is not for that I give it you.  It is to give you pleasure too.”

He was labouring under an almost physical distress.  She was poking fun at him, at herself, at death.  She was making him a partner of thieves and loose women.  And yet: 

“It must not make you sad at all.  When you see it you laugh—­just as you laugh when I dance because I dance so ver’ bad.  Look ’ere, I ’ave something that you give me too.”  She dived back into the box and brought out a shilling lying side by side with the pearl in the palm of her open hand.  “You tell ’er—­that was all poor Gyp was worth to you, Monsieur Robert.”

He had taken it.  She tried to laugh out loud, triumphantly, the famous laugh.  And then grey agony had her by the throat.  She turned her face from him to the wall.