“You must do exactly what your husband tells you, and then you won’t go far wrong.”

And he hurried her into the carriage.

Thérèse noticed the lawyer’s outstretched hand, with its coarse dark nails:

“All’s well that ends well,” said he, and indeed he really meant it. If the case had gone any further he would not have got much out of it. The family would have called in Maître Peyrecave of the Bordeaux Bar: so everything was for the best.

CHAPTER II

Thérèse loved the musty leathery smell of old carriages: and she did not mind having left her cigarettes behind, for she hated smoking in the dark. The carriage lamps lit up the sloping banks each side of the road, a strip of ferns and undergrowth, and the feet of the giant pines. At intervals, heaps of stones by the wayside cut across the moving shadow of the carriage. Sometimes a country cart passed them, and the mules instinctively moved to the right-hand side of the road without a sign from the sleeping muleteer. Thérèse began to feel that she would never reach Argelouse; she hoped she never would. It was more than an hour in the carriage to Nizan, where she got into the little local train that stopped, heaven knows how long, at every station. And from Saint Clair, where she got out, to Argelouse, she had to drive ten miles in a trap, for the road was such that no car could be driven along it at night. Fate could rise up at any one of these stages and set her free. Thérèse indulged herself with the fancy that had come over her the day before the Judge had given his decision, supposing the charge against her had been confirmed: the possibility of an earthquake. She took off her hat, leaned her pale cheeks and little throbbing head against the pungent leather, and let her body sway to the jolting of the carriage. Until that evening she had been living on her nerves: now that she was safe she began to realise the extent of her exhaustion. Her hollow cheeks, gaunt cheek-bones, sunken lips, and low broad forehead, were surely the features of one convicted,—although her fellow-men had not pronounced her guilty,—convicted and condemned to eternal solitude. That charm of hers, which every one used to say was irresistible,— was it not the conscious charm of those who must be always on the watch to conceal their secret torment, the stabbing agony of the wound within them? In the darkness of that jolting carriage, on that highway through the dark pine-forest, sat a young woman, now without her mask, whose face, as she passed her hand wearily across her forehead, was the face of one burning at the stake. What would be the first words of Bernard whose perjury had saved her? He would probably not ask any questions that evening,—but to-morrow? Thérèse shut her eyes, opened them again, and, like horses when they drop into a walk uphill, tried to realise the terrible ascent that lay before her. Well, well, she would not look ahead; it would perhaps be easier than she thought; she would not look ahead at all,—just sleep.... But she is no longer in the carriage ... who is that behind the green-baize table? ... the examining Judge ... what, again? But surely he knows that it is all over. No, he shakes his head: the case cannot be dropped, a new fact has come to light. A new fact? Thérèse turns away so that her enemy shall not see her confusion. “Cast your mind back, Madame: In the inner pocket of that old cloak,—the one you used only in October for pigeon-shooting, was there nothing forgotten or concealed?” She cannot speak, the words stick in her throat. Without taking his eyes off his victim, the Judge lays upon the table a tiny packet sealed with red wax. Thérèse knows by heart the formula written on the label, which he proceeds to read out with terrible distinctness.

And the Judge bursts out laughing....

The brake rasped against the wheel, and Thérèse awoke. Her heaving lungs were full of mist,—they must be driving down to the “White Brook.” So, in her girlhood, she used to dream that, by some mistake, she had had to take her junior certificate examination over again; and when she awoke this evening she felt as relieved as she used to do in those far-off days: just a touch of anxiety because the decision was not yet official, though she realised, of course, that her lawyer had to be notified first.