Suddenly he rose and seizing her arm roughly, gave her another cue, which she remorselessly and instantly took.
"There is someone else," he cried, utterly forgetting that the very day before she had loved him madly, "you love some other man. Tell me who it is!"
And with the extraordinary fortitude common to fanatics and furious women, she smiled and answered:
"Perhaps! Tout passe, mon cher."
It was a cheap and melodramatic bit of acting, and any unprejudiced onlooker must have seen the agony in her face, but Joyselle was blinded by his own pain and fled from the room without another word.
She heard a door slam and knew that he had gone out. And the world came to an end for her.
It was about six o'clock, and Tommy had gone out with Théo. They would not be back until about eight.
Félicité, too, was out. She was alone. She saw Papillon, who was sitting up, looking at her with a world of sympathy in the cock of his ear.
Suddenly Brigit burst into tears, nervous, hysterical, noisy sobbing, as she had done that day in the olive grove at the Villa Arcadie. She had been living under great nervous strain for months, and these breakdowns were of appalling violence. She could not stop crying, and she could not reason and tell herself that he would come back and forgive her.
All she could realise was her hideous misery and sense of desolation. She was utterly alone, she was hungry, she was cold, she was hopeless.