"Please don't say anything more. There's always that between us. It is a gulf which we cannot hope to fill with words."
She seemed so much exhausted that I made a movement to leave her. She stopped me:
"No," she said, "don't go. I am not going to be ill . . . for more than a day or two, at the outside. First of all, I want everything to be quite clear between us; I want you to understand every single thing that I have done. Listen to me. . . ."
"To-morrow, Bérangère."
"No, to-day," she insisted. "I feel a need to tell you at once what I have to say. Nothing will do more to restore my peace of mind. Listen to me. . . ."
She did not have to entreat me long. How could I have wearied of looking at her and listening to her? We had been through such trials when separated from each other that I was afraid, after all, of being parted from her now.
She put her arm round my neck. Her beautiful lips were quivering beneath my eyes. Seeing my gaze fixed upon them, she smiled:
"You remember, in the Yard . . . the first time. . . . From that day, I hated you . . . and adored you. . . . I was your enemy . . . and your slave. . . . Yes, all my independent and rather wild nature was up in arms at not being able to shake off a recollection which gave me so much pain . . . and so much pleasure! . . . I was mastered. I ran away from you. I kept on coming back to you . . . and I should have come back altogether, if that man—you know whom I mean—had not spoken to me one morning. . . ."
"Velmot! What did he come for? What did he want?"
"He came from my father. What he wanted, as I perceived later, was through me to enter into Noël Dorgeroux's life and rob him of the secret of his invention."