"I am coming directly. Go back to your room and wait for me," as if she had no doubt of being obeyed.
A profound silence ensued. Perhaps Catherine had gone already. Réal and Arlette stood still for a whole minute as if both had been changed into stone.
"Go now," said Réal in a hoarse, hardly audible voice.
She gave him a quick kiss on the lips and again they stood like a pair of enchanted lovers bewitched into immobility.
"If she stays on," thought Réal, "I shall never have the courage to tear myself away, and then I shall have to blow my brains out." But when at last she moved he seized her again and held her as if she had been his very life. When he let her go he was appalled by hearing a very faint laugh of her secret joy.
"Why do you laugh?" he asked in a scared tone.
She stopped to answer him over her shoulder.
"I laughed because I thought of all the days to come. Days and days and days. Have you thought of them?"
"Yes," Réal faltered, like a man stabbed to the heart, holding the door half open. And he was glad to have something to hold on to.
She slipped out with a soft rustle of her silk skirt, but before he had time to close the door behind her she put back her arm for an instant. He had just time to press the palm of her hand to his lips. It was cool. She snatched it away and he had the strength of mind to shut the door after her. He felt like a man chained to the wall and dying of thirst, from whom a cold drink is snatched away. The room became dark suddenly. He thought, "A cloud over the moon, a cloud over the moon, an enormous cloud," while he walked rigidly to the window, insecure and swaying as if on a tight rope. After a moment he perceived the moon in a sky on which there was no sign of the smallest cloud anywhere. He said to himself, "I suppose I nearly died just now. But no," he went on thinking with deliberate cruelty, "Oh, no, I shall not die. I shall only suffer, suffer, suffer. . . ."