But then, in order that Julio might not feel any false hopes, she added:—­“Live; you must not die; that would be for me another torment. . . .  But live without me.  No matter how much we may talk about it, my destiny beside the other one is marked out forever.”

“Ah, how you love him! . . .  How you have deceived me!”

In a last desperate attempt at explanation she again repeated what she had said at the beginning of their interview.  She loved Julio . . . and she loved her husband.  They were different kinds of love.  She could not say which was the stronger, but misfortune was forcing her to choose between the two, and she was accepting the most difficult, the one demanding the greatest sacrifices.

“You are a man, and you will never be able to understand me. . . .  A woman would comprehend me.”

It seemed to Julio, as he looked around him, as though the afternoon were undergoing some celestial phenomenon.  The garden was still illuminated by the sun, but the green of the trees, the yellow of the ground, the blue of the sky, all appeared to him as dark and shadowy as though a rain of ashes were falling.

“Then . . . all is over between us?”

His pleading, trembling voice charged with tears made her turn her head to hide her emotion.  Then in the painful silence the two despairs formed one and the same question, as if interrogating the shades of the future:  “What will become of me?” murmured the man.  And like an echo her lips repeated, “What will become of me?”

All had been said.  Hopeless words came between the two like an obstacle momentarily increasing in size, impelling them in opposite directions.  Why prolong the painful interview? . . .  Marguerite showed the ready and energetic decision of a woman who wishes to bring a scene to a close.  “Good-bye!” Her face had assumed a yellowish cast, her pupils had become dull and clouded like the glass of a lantern when the light dies out.  “Good-bye!” She must go to her patient.

She went away without looking at him, and Desnoyers instinctively went in the opposite direction.  As he became more self-controlled and turned to look at her again, he saw her moving on and giving her arm to the blind man, without once turning her head.

He now felt convinced that he should never see her again, and became oppressed by an almost suffocating agony.  And could two beings, who had formerly considered the universe concentrated in their persons, thus easily be separated forever? . . .

His desperation at finding himself alone made him accuse himself of stupidity.  Now his thoughts came tumbling over each other in a tumultuous throng, and each one of them seemed to him sufficient to have convinced Marguerite.  He certainly had not known how to express himself.  He would have to talk with her again . . . and he decided to remain in Lourdes.