‘Yes, I know, a dawdler,’ said Claude, getting as interested as if he were listening to a fairy tale.  ‘So you got into his cab?’

Looking up at the ceiling, Christine continued, without shifting her position:  ’He made me; he called me his little dear, and frightened me.  When he found out that I was going to Passy, he became very angry, and whipped his horse so hard that I was obliged to hold on by the doors.  After that I felt more easy, because the cab trundled along all right through the lighted streets, and I saw people about.  At last I recognised the Seine, for though I was never in Paris before, I had often looked at a map.  Naturally I thought he would keep along the quay, so I became very frightened again on noticing that we crossed a bridge.  Just then it began to rain, and the cab, which had got into a very dark turning, suddenly stopped.  The driver got down from his seat, and declared it was raining too hard for him to remain on the box—­’

Claude burst out laughing.  He no longer doubted.  She could not have invented that driver.  And as she suddenly stopped, somewhat confused, he said, ‘All right, the cabman was having a joke.’

‘I jumped out at once by the other door,’ resumed Christine.  ’Then he began to swear at me, saying that we had arrived at Passy, and that he would tear my hat from my head if I did not pay him.  It was raining in torrents, and the quay was absolutely deserted.  I was losing my head, and when I had pulled out a five-franc piece, he whipped up his horse and drove off, taking my little bag, which luckily only contained two pocket-handkerchiefs, a bit of cake, and the key of my trunk, which I had been obliged to leave behind in the train.’

‘But you ought to have taken his number,’ exclaimed the artist indignantly.  In fact he now remembered having been brushed against by a passing cab, which had rattled by furiously while he was crossing the Pont Louis Philippe, amid the downpour of the storm.  And he reflected how improbable truth often was.  The story he had conjured up as being the most simple and logical was utterly stupid beside the natural chain of life’s many combinations.

‘You may imagine how I felt under the doorway,’ concluded Christine.  ’I knew well enough that I was not at Passy, and that I should have to spend the night there, in this terrible Paris.  And there was the thunder and the lightning—­those horrible blue and red flashes, which showed me things that made me tremble.’

She closed her eyelids once more, she shivered, and the colour left her cheeks as, in her fancy, she again beheld the tragic city—­that line of quays stretching away in a furnace-like blaze, the deep moat of the river, with its leaden waters obstructed by huge black masses, lighters looking like lifeless whales, and bristling with motionless cranes which stretched forth gallows-like arms.  Was that a welcome to Paris?

Again did silence fall.  Claude had resumed his drawing.  But she became restless, her arm was getting stiff.