§ 10
She stopped in her swift flight to him through the dusk of the Midi garden.
"Dearest, why is your face so white? Your hands bruised?"
"The consul said something to me—about you—and I knocked him down."
"Oh!" she said, a shocked little cry, and: "Oh!" a drawn-out wail of pain. "Why did you strike him?"
"Because he lied about you."
Her face was turned from him, in the dusk of the crickets, toward the wooded amphitheater, where dead Pontius roved wild-eyed in the dusk, where Lazarus tossed uneasily in his second sleep, where the Greeks lay in alien soil, and the shadows of Roman legionaries looked puzzled at the flat sea, not recognizing busy Tiber—her back was to him, her head up in pain, her nerve-wrenched hands uneasy, white....
"He didn't lie," she said at last. "Oh, you'd have known it sooner or later. No! no! He didn't lie."
"Claire-Anne!"
"He didn't lie. I was just a fool to think—oh, well, he didn't lie. No, no!" she repeated. "He didn't lie." She threw out a hand hopelessly. "He didn't lie."