laughs were sparkling! How good it was!
The doctor reappeared from around the turn, the wonderful, magnificent, thinnest doctor.
“Well?” He was already beside her.
“Oh, nothing, nothing. I shall tell you later. He got here by accident. Tell them that I shall be back in about a quarter of an hour.”
The doctor slid around the corner. She lingered. The door closed with a heavy thud. Then slowly, very slowly, piercing my heart with a sharp sweet needle, I-330 pressed against me with her shoulder and then with her arm, with her whole body, and we walked away as if fused into one.
I do not remember now where we turned into darkness; in the darkness we walked up some endless stairway in silence. I did not see but I knew, I knew that she walked as I did, with closed eyes, blind, her head thrown a little backward, biting her lips and listening to the music, that is to say, to my almost audible tremor.
I returned to consciousness in one of the innumerable nooks in the courtyard of the Ancient House. There was a fence of earth with naked stone ribs and yellow teeth of walls half fallen to pieces. She opened her eyes and said, “Day-after-tomorrow at sixteen.” She was gone.
Did all this really happen? I do not know. I shall learn day-after-tomorrow. One real sign
remains: on my right hand the skin has been rubbed from the tips of three fingers. But today, on the Integral the Second Builder assured me that he saw me touch the polishing wheel with those very same fingers. Perhaps I did. It is quite probable. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.