“Downright shameful,” M. Le Mesge kept on saying in exasperation, thumping his fist on the table.

“So clear were the distances that I could see, as if I had it under my eyes, infinitely enlarged, every contour of the rock which Violante had shown me through the window with the gesture of a creator....”

Trembling, I closed the magazine.  At my feet, now red, I saw the rock which Antinea had pointed out to me the day of our first interview, huge, steep, overhanging the reddish brown garden.

“That is my horizon,” she had said.

M. Le Mesge’s excitement had passed all bounds.

“It is worse than shameful; it is infamous.”

I almost wanted to strangle him into silence.  He seized my arm.

“Read that, sir; and, although you don’t know a great deal about the subject, you will see that this article on Roman Africa is a miracle of misinformation, a monument of ignorance.  And it is signed ... do you know by whom it is signed?”

“Leave me alone,” I said brutally.

“Well, it is signed Gaston Boissier.  Yes, sir!  Gaston Boissier, grand officer of the Legion of Honor, lecturer at the Ecole Normale Superieure, permanent secretary of the French Academy, member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Literature, one of those who once ruled out the subject of my thesis ... one of those ... ah, poor university, ah, poor France!”

I was no longer listening.  I had begun to read again.  My forehead was covered with sweat.  But it seemed as if my head had been cleared like a room when a window is opened; memories were beginning to come back like doves winging their way home to the dovecote.

“At that moment, an irrepressible tremor shook her whole body; her eyes dilated as if some terrible sight had filled them with horror.

“‘Antonello,’ she murmured.

“And for seconds, she was unable to say another word.

“I looked at her in mute anguish and the suffering which drew her dear lips together seemed also to clutch at my heart.  The vision which was in her eyes passed into mine, and I saw again the thin white face of Antonello, and the quick quivering of his eyelids, the waves of agony which seized his long worn body and shook it like a reed.”

I threw the magazine upon the table.

“That is it,” I said.

To cut the pages, I had used the knife with which M. Le Mesge had cut the cords of the bale, a short ebony-handled dagger, one of those daggers that the Tuareg wear in a bracelet sheath against the upper left arm.

I slipped it into the big pocket of my flannel dolman and walked toward the door.

I was about to cross the threshold when I heard M. Le Mesge call me.

“Monsieur de Saint Avit!  Monsieur de Saint Avit!

“I want to ask you something, please.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing important.  You know that I have to mark the labels for the red marble hall....”