He passed a night of torture in the hotel, listening to the ripple of the river among its stones.  Insomnia had him in his fierce jaws, gnawing him with interminable agony.  He turned on the light several times, but was not able to read.  His eyes looked with stupid fixity at the patterns of the wall paper and the pious pictures around the room which had evidently served as the lodging place of some rich traveller.  He remained motionless and as abstracted as an Oriental who thinks himself into an absolute lack of thought.  One idea only was dancing in the vacuum in his skull—­“I shall never see her again. . . .  Can such a thing be possible?”

He drowsed for a few seconds, only to be awakened with the sensation that some horrible explosion was sending him through the air.  And so, with sweats of anguish, he wakefully passed the hours until in the gloom of his room the dawn showed a milky rectangle of light, and began to be reflected on the window curtains.

The velvet-like caress of day finally closed his eyes.  Upon awaking he found that the morning was well advanced, and he hurried to the garden of the grotto. . . .  Oh, the hours of tremulous and unavailing waiting, believing that he recognized Marguerite in every white-clad lady that came along, guiding a wounded patient!

By afternoon, after a lunch whose dishes filed past him untouched, he returned to the garden in search of her.  Beholding her in the distance with the blind man leaning on her arm, a feeling of faintness came over him.  She looked to him taller, thinner, her face sharper, with two dark hollows in her cheeks and her eyes bright with fever, the lids drawn with weariness.  He suspected that she, too, had passed an anguished night of tenacious, self-centred thought, of grievous stupefaction like his own, in the room of her hotel.  Suddenly he felt all the weight of insomnia and listlessness, all the depressing emotion of the cruel sensations experienced in the last few hours.  Oh, how miserable they both were! . . .

She was walking warily, looking from one side to the other, as though foreseeing danger.  Upon discovering him she clung to her charge, casting upon her former lover a look of entreaty, of desperation, imploring pity. . .  Ay, that look!

He felt ashamed of himself; his personality appeared to be unrolling itself before him, and he surveyed himself with the eyes of a judge.  What was this seduced and useless man, called Julio Desnoyers, doing there, tormenting with his presence a poor woman, trying to turn her from her righteous repentance, insisting on his selfish and petty desires when all humanity was thinking of other things? . . .  His cowardice angered him.  Like a thief taking advantage of the sleep of his victim, he was stalking around this brave and true man who could not see him, who could not defend himself, in order to rob him of the only affection that he had in the world which had so miraculously returned to him!  Very well, Gentleman Desnoyers! . . .  Ah, what a scoundrel he was!