Suddenly she was seized with laughter, nervous, frantic, ungovernable, lugubrious as the laughter of the insane.
Frightened, he let her go. He looked at her with manifest horror, thinking, "Is this madness?"
She laughed, laughed, laughed, writhing, hiding her face in her hands, biting her fingers, holding her sides; she laughed, laughed in spite of herself, shaken by long, sonorous hiccoughs.
At intervals, she stopped for a second; then recommenced with renewed violence. And nothing was more lugubrious than these mad laughs in the silence of the magnificent night.
"Don't be afraid! Don't be afraid!" she said, during the pauses, at the sight of her perplexed and frightened lover. "I am calmer now. Go out, please. Please go out!"
He went back on the loggia, as if in a dream. Nevertheless, his brain retained a strange lucidity and strange wakefulness. All his acts, all his perceptions had for him the unreality of a dream, and assumed at the same time a signification as profound as that of an allegory. He still heard behind him the ill-repressed laughter; he retained still in his fingers the sensation of the impure thing. He saw above and around him the beauty of the summer evening. He knew what was on the point of being accomplished.
The laughs ceased. Again, in the silence, he perceived the vibrations of the pendulum and the beats of the flax brake on the distant area. A groan coming from the house of the old people made him shudder: it was the pain of her who was now in childbirth.
"All must be accomplished!" he thought.
And, turning, he crossed the threshold with a firm step.
Hippolyte lay upon the sofa, recomposed, pale, her eyes half-closed. At the approach of her lover, she smiled.