With an effort at diversion, she tried to recall the names of the cities in which she stayed, through which she had passed during the first few months of her exile.
In vain. She had only a confused impression of scorching streets, of palm trees against a hot blue sky; of seas hatefully, mockingly calm and blue.
She was in Athens when the news of his death reached her, and with it a packet of letters written during the first few weeks after her departure. They were letters from René, never sent, because she had left no address. Letters written in the frenzied hope that some day soon he must hear from her.
It was then that she tasted her first moment of peace.
She remembered sitting in a little walled garden somewhere within the city, and for the first time seeing that the blue sky overhead was beautiful.
She noticed the broad leaves of a fig-tree clambering upon the wall opposite, and listened to the dripping of a little stream which flowed from a stone trough into a well whose mouth was fringed delicately with ferns and wild flowers. And for the first time came to her a premonition of the calm and peace, and even happiness of her later years.
Her emotional life was over. No man as a lover would ever exist for her again. But she had experienced the love for which she had been willing to pay. She had paid, and some day she would be content.
René dead, had become hers once more—this time for ever.
Later in the year she met François at Antibes, and heard calmly, with scarcely a stab of pain, what she was prepared to hear. She had been right to go. But René had died before he ceased to love her.
Afterwards, her true wander years began. And then at last, the thought of the house and the garden at Dymfield became dear to her, and she went to them as a child goes home.