At that he turned quickly toward me; it did not lessen my remorse to see that he had grown very pale.

“I wouldn’t have frightened her for the world,” he said, and his voice and his whole body shook with a strange violence.  “I wouldn’t have frightened her to please the angels in heaven!”

A blunderer whose incantation had brought the spirit up to face me, I stared at him helplessly, nor could I find words to answer or control the passion that my imbecile scolding had evoked.  Whatever the barriers Keredec’s training had built for his protection, they were down now.

“You think I told a lie!” he cried.  “You think I lied when I said I couldn’t help speaking to her!”

“No, no,” I said earnestly.  “I didn’t mean—­”

“Words!” he swept the feeble protest away, drowned in a whirling vehemence.  “And what does it matter?  You can’t understand.  When you want to know what to do, you look back into your life and it tells you; and I look back—­ah!” He cried out, uttering a half-choked, incoherent syllable.  “I look back and it’s all—­blind!  All these things you can do and can’t do—­all these infinite little things!  You know, and Keredec knows, and Glouglou knows, and every mortal soul on earth knows—­but I don’t know!  Your life has taught you, and you know, but I don’t know.  I haven’t had my life.  It’s gone!  All I have is words that Keredec has said to me, and it’s like a man with no eyes, out in the sunshine hunting for the light.  Do you think words can teach you to resist such impulses as I had when I spoke to Madame d’Armand?  Can life itself teach you to resist them?  Perhaps you never had them?”

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly.

“I would burn my hand from my arm and my arm from my body,” he went on, with the same wild intensity, “rather than trouble her or frighten her, but I couldn’t help speaking to her any more than I can help wanting to see her again—­the feeling that I must—­whatever you say or do, whatever Keredec says or does, whatever the whole world may say or do.  And I will!  It isn’t a thing to choose to do, or not to do.  I can’t help it any more than I can help being alive!”

He paused, wiping from his brow a heavy dew not of the heat, but like that on the forehead of a man in crucial pain.  I made nervous haste to seize the opportunity, and said gently, almost timidly: 

“But if it should distress the lady?”

“Yes—­then I could keep away.  But I must know that.”

“I think you might know it by her running away—­and by her look,” I said mildly.  “Didn’t you?”

“No!” And his eyes flashed an added emphasis.

“Well, well,” I said, “let’s be on our way, or the professor will be wondering if he is to dine alone.”

Without looking to see if he followed, I struck into the path toward home.  He did follow, obediently enough, not uttering another word so long as we were in the woods, though I could hear him breathing sharply as he strode behind me, and knew that he was struggling to regain control of himself.  I set the pace, making it as fast as I could, and neither of us spoke again until we had come out of the forest and were upon the main road near the Baudry cottage.  Then he said in a steadier voice: