"Well then, to-morrow night."
"It's the same for the other nights. And then I'm not alone at night; I'm spied on."
"Then it will never be?"
And that little rascal of a Sylvie replied, twisting with laughter:
"But I'm not afraid of the daylight! Are you afraid of it? . . ."
Annette could listen no longer. A storm of disgust, fury, and unhappiness swept her away, running, into the night, into the fields. Perhaps they heard the noise of her mad flight and the crackling of branches, like that which follows on the heels of a fleeing animal. But she no longer cared whether she was heard or not. Nothing mattered any more. She was fleeing, fleeing. . . . Whither? She did not know. She never knew. . . . She ran through the night, moaning. She did not see ahead of her. She ran on for five minutes, twenty minutes, an hour? She never knew how long. . . . Until her foot struck a root, and she fell full length, her head against a tree trunk. . . . And then she screamed, she howled, with her mouth against the ground, like a wounded beast.
Around her, the night. A sky without moon or stars, black. A mute earth, untroubled by a breath or by the cries of insects. Only the sound of a trickle of water over the pebbles, dripping at the foot of the slim fir against which Annette had struck her forehead. And from the depths of the gorge that cut the high, abrupt plateau, there rose the fierce rumbling of a mountain stream. Its plaint mingled with the plaint of the wounded woman. They seemed the eternal lamento of the earth. . . .
So long as she cried, she did not think. Her body, shaken by convulsive sobs, was ridding itself of the burden of evil that had crushed it down for days. The mind was silent. Then the body, exhausted, ceased to moan. Mental misery rose to the surface. And Annette again became conscious of her forsakenness. She was alone and betrayed. The circle of her thoughts could stretch no further. She had not the strength to reassemble their dispersed company. She had not even the strength to get up. Stretched out, she abandoned herself to the earth. . . . Oh! if only the earth wished to take her! . . . The rumbling of the mountain stream was speaking, thinking for her.
It was bathing her wound. After a period (long, no doubt) of prostrate suffering, Annette slowly raised her stricken body. The bruise on her forehead pained her sharply enough, and preoccupation with this hurt eased her mind. She dipped her scratched hands in the rivulet, she pressed them against her wounded, burning forehead. And so she remained seated, her eyes and forehead sunk in her wet palms, feeling the penetration of that icy purity. . . . And her grief became a distant thing. . . . She observed its moaning as might a stranger; and she no longer understood the meaning of those transports. She was thinking:
"Why? . . . What's the good? . . . Is it worth the pain? . . ."