“How did the thing happen?  You can tell me.”

She shrugged her shoulders with so much pity that he dared not continue.  He became contemptuous again.

“Do you imagine that I shall aid you in saving appearances, that I shall return to your house, that I shall continue to call on your husband?”

“I think you will continue to do what a gentleman should.  I ask nothing of you.  I should have liked to preserve of you the reminiscence of an excellent friend.  I thought you might be indulgent and kind to, me, but it is not possible.  I see that lovers never separate kindly.  Later, you will judge me better.  Farewell!”

He looked at her.  Now his face expressed more pain than anger.  She never had seen his eyes so dry and so black.  It seemed as if he had grown old in an hour.

“I prefer to tell you in advance.  It will be impossible for me to see you again.  You are not a woman whom one may meet after one has been loved by her.  You are not like others.  You have a poison of your own, which you have given to me, and which I feel in me, in my veins.  Why have I known you?”

She looked at him kindly.

“Farewell!  Say to yourself that I am not worthy of being regretted so much.”

Then, when he saw that she placed her hand on the latch of the door, when he felt at that gesture that he was to lose her, that he should never have her again, he shouted.  He forgot everything.  There remained in him only the dazed feeling of a great misfortune accomplished, of an irreparable calamity.  And from the depth of his stupor a desire ascended.  He desired to possess again the woman who was leaving him and who would never return.  He drew her to him.  He desired her, with all the strength of his animal nature.  She resisted with all the force of her will, which was free and on the alert.  She disengaged herself, crumpled, torn, without even having been afraid.

He understood that everything was useless; he realized she was no longer for him, because she belonged to another.  As his suffering returned, he pushed her out of the door.

She remained a moment in the corridor, proudly waiting for a word.

But he shouted again, “Go!” and shut the door violently.

On the Via Alfieri, she saw again the pavilion in the rear of the courtyard where pale grasses grew.  She found it silent and tranquil, faithful, with its goats and nymphs, to the lovers of the time of the Grand Duchess Eliza.  She felt at once freed from the painful, brutal world, and transported to ages wherein she had not known the sadness of life.  At the foot of the stairs, the steps of which were covered with roses, Dechartre was waiting.  She threw herself in his arms.  He carried her inert, like a precious trophy before which he had become pallid and trembling.  She enjoyed, her eyelids half closed, the superb humiliation of being a beautiful prey.  Her fatigue, her sadness, her disgust with the day, the reminiscence of violence, her regained liberty, the need of forgetting, remains of fright, everything vivified, awakened her tenderness.  She threw her arms around the neck of her lover.