Toward mid-day Florian parted with his sister for the last time. He found it rather appalling that neither she nor he was moved by this leave-taking. Then he reflected: “But we are dead persons, dead a great while ago. This is the calm of death.”
He saw that this was true, and got from it the comfort which he always derived from logic.
Nevertheless, he went back very softly, and he peered through the door he had left not quite closed. Marie-Claire now knelt before the dark polished stone in whose gleaming moved figures.
“Lalle, Bachera, Magotte, Baphia—” she had begun.
Florian shrugged as, this time, he really went away from the house of oak and plaster. He knew whom she invoked. But that did not matter either. And in fact, for Marie-Claire to pass from him to that other was profoundly logical.
25.
The Gander That Sang
LORIAN followed the brook. Florian went hillward, walking upon what seemed a long-ruined roadway. As he went upstream, the brook was to his left hand: to his right was the hillside thick with trees. Florian, whose familiarity with rural affairs was limited, was perforce content to recognize among these trees the maples, the oaks, the pines and the chestnuts.
“Only, I should by every precedent, now that I go to inevitable destruction, be observing everything with unnatural vividness,” he reflected: “and to have about me so many familiar looking but to me anonymous trees and bushes makes my impression of the scenery quite unbecomingly vague.”