“For the present you have nothing further to say to me?”
“Nothing further for the present.”
“Good-bye, Monsieur de Baraglioul.”
Lafcadio bowed gravely and went out.
He went up to his room on the floor above, half undressed and flung himself on his bed. The end of the day had been very hot and no freshness had come with the night. His window stood wide open but not a breath stirred the air; the electric globes of the Piazza dei Termi, far away on the other side of the garden, shone into his room and filled it with a diffused and bluish light which might have been the moon’s. He tried to reflect, but a strange torpor—a despairing numbness—crept over his mind; it was not of his crime that he thought nor of how to escape; the only effort he could make was not to hear those dreadful words of Julius: “I was beginning to care for you.” ...If he himself did not care for Julius, were those words worth his tears?... Was that really why he was weeping?... The night was so soft that he felt as though he had only to let himself go for death to take him. He reached out for the water bottle by his bed-side, soaked his handkerchief and held it to his heart, which was hurting him.
“No drink will ever slake again the thirst of my parched heart,” said he, letting the tears course down his face unchecked, so as to taste their bitterness to the full on his lips. A line or two of poetry, read he knew not where and unconsciously remembered, kept singing in his ears:
“My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains
My senses....”
He fell into a doze.
Is he dreaming? Or is that a knock at his door? His door, which he always leaves unlocked at night, opens gently and a slender white figure comes in. He hears a faint call:
“Lafcadio!... Are you there, Lafcadio?”