“Go away, Kim! Go away!” she cried brokenly. “You cannot understand—I do not know! Go away—please go away!”
The servant left her. But that night when she came to the bishop’s door she hesitated, picked the hem of her garment; turned away; came back, then knocked ruefully on the portal.
When the Breton came to the wife’s apartments he no longer stood on the threshold waiting for her salutation or expectant of her laughter. Crossing the room, naïvely eager, he sat down in his chair and, looking up to certain crevices in the screen, remained silent with a smile in his eyes.
Day by day these silences grew longer. Without laughter, without converse, almost without movement, each sat close to the screen—so close that her red pouting finger tips were hardly over his head, and sometimes through the crevices just above them flashed a light, dark and lustrous.
In this manner it came about that Silence held them more and more beneath its velvet hand, although this stillness of theirs was not mute nor somnolent. At intervals it was broken by a question, a reprimand, a whisper; a word that caressed or a burst of scorn; only laughter came not again. Their conversations were no more than flashes; an ignition, an illumination.
Sometimes the Breton would look up as if about to say something and the wife, breathless, would demand:
“What?”
He never spoke. Yet one day in the midst of their silence he lifted his eyes to the crevice, his lips moved, but only his eyes uttered.
Hastily the wife withdrew her fingers; there was a flutter of silk; constrained stillness.
“Oh, well,” she commented, turning back to the screen, “it doesn’t matter; if a man can’t get ivory from a rat’s mouth, how can a woman expect truth from a man’s?”