“Monsieur’s dinner is ready.”

He replied: 

“All right.  I’m coming down.”

Then he picked up the revolver, locked it up again in the drawer and looked at himself in the mirror over the mantelpiece to see whether his face did not look too much troubled.  It was as red as usual, a little redder perhaps.  That was all.  He went down and seated himself at table.

He ate slowly, like a man who wants to prolong the meal, who does not want to be alone.

Then he smoked several pipes in the hall while the table was being cleared.  After that he went back to his room.

As soon as he had locked himself in he looked, under the bed, opened all the closets, explored every corner, rummaged through all the furniture.  Then he lighted the candles on the mantelpiece, and, turning round several times, ran his eye all over the apartment with an anguish of terror that distorted his face, for he knew well that he would see her, as he did every night—­little Louise Roque, the little girl he had attacked and afterward strangled.

Every night the odious vision came back again.  First he seemed to hear a kind of roaring sound, such as is made by a threshing machine or the distant passage of a train over a bridge.  Then he commenced to gasp, to suffocate, and he had to unbutton his collar and his belt.  He moved about to make his blood circulate, he tried to read, he attempted to sing.  It was in vain.  His thoughts, in spite of himself, went back to the day of the murder and made him begin it all over again in all its most secret details, with all the violent emotions he had experienced from the first minute to the last.

He had felt on rising that morning, the morning of the horrible day, a little dizziness and headache, which he attributed to the heat, so that he remained in his room until breakfast time.

After the meal he had taken a siesta, then, toward the close of the afternoon, he had gone out to breathe the fresh, soothing breeze under the trees in the wood.

But, as soon as he was outside, the heavy, scorching air of the plain oppressed him still more.  The sun, still high in the heavens, poured down on the parched soil waves of burning light.  Not a breath of wind stirred the leaves.  Every beast and bird, even the grasshoppers, were silent.  Renardet reached the tall trees and began to walk over the moss where the Brindille produced a slight freshness of the air beneath the immense roof of branches.  But he felt ill at ease.  It seemed to him that an unknown, invisible hand was strangling him, and he scarcely thought of anything, having usually few ideas in his head.  For the last three months only one thought haunted him, the thought of marrying again.  He suffered from living alone, suffered from it morally and physically.  Accustomed for ten years past to feeling a woman near him, habituated to her presence every moment, he had need, an imperious and perplexing