The melody ended. Silence…. While she was singing she had laid her hand on Christophe's shoulder. They dared not move: and each felt the other trembling. Suddenly—in a flash—she bent down to him, he turned to her: their lips met: he drank her breath….
She flung away from him and fled. He stayed, not stirring in the dark. Braun returned. They sat down to dinner. Christophe was incapable of thought. Anna seemed absent-minded: she was looking "elsewhere." Shortly after dinner she went to her room. Christophe found it impossible to stay alone with Braun, and went upstairs also.
About midnight the doctor was called from his bed to a patient. Christophe heard him go downstairs and out. It had been snowing ever since six o'clock. The houses and the streets were under a shroud. The air was as though it were padded with cotton-wool. Not a step, not a carriage could be heard outside. The town seemed dead. Christophe could not sleep. He had a feeling of terror which grew from minute to minute. He could not stir. He lay stiff in his bed, on his back, with his eyes wide open. A metallic light cast up from the white earth and roofs fell upon the walls of the room…. An imperceptible noise made him tremble. Only a man at a feverish tension could have heard it. Came a soft rustling on the floor of the passage. Christophe sat up in bed. The faint noise came nearer, stopped; a board creaked. There was some one behind the door: some one waiting…. Absolute stillness for a few seconds, perhaps for several minutes…. Christophe could not breathe, he broke out into a sweat. Outside flakes of snow brushed the window as with a wing. A hand fumbled with the door and opened it. There appeared a white form, and it came slowly forward: it halted a few yards away from him. Christophe could see nothing clearly: but he could hear her breathing: and he could hear his own heart thumping. She came nearer to him; once more she halted. Their faces were so near that their breath mingled. Their eyes sought each other vainly in the darkness…. She fell into his arms. In silence, without a word, they hugged each other close, frenziedly….
* * * * *
An hour, two hours, a century later, the door of the house was opened. Anna broke from the embrace in which they were locked, slipped away, and left Christophe without a word, just as she had come. He heard her bare feet moving away, just skimming the floor in her swift flight. She regained her room, and there Braun found her in her bed, apparently asleep. So she lay through the night, with eyes wide open, breathless, still, in her narrow bed near the sleeping Braun. How many nights had she passed like that!
Christophe could not sleep either. He was utterly in despair. He had always regarded the things of love, and especially marriage, with tragic seriousness. He hated the frivolity of those writers whose art uses adultery as a spicy flavoring. Adultery roused in him a feeling of repulsion which was a combination of his vulgar brutality and high morality. He had always felt a mixture of religious respect and physical disgust for a woman who belonged to another man. The doglike promiscuity in which some of the rich people in Europe lived appalled him. Adultery with the consent of the husband is a filthy thing: without the husband's knowledge it is a base deceit only worthy of a rascally servant hiding away to betray and befoul his master's honor. How often had he not piteously despised those whom he had known to be guilty of such cowardice! He had broken with some of his friends who had thus dishonored themselves in his eyes…. And now he too was sullied with the same shameful thing! The circumstances of the crime only made it the more odious. He had come to the house a sick, wretched man. His friend had welcomed him, helped him, given him comfort. His kindness had never flagged. Nothing had been too great a demand upon it. He owed him his very life. And in return he had robbed the man of his honor and his happiness, his poor little domestic happiness! He had basely betrayed him, and with whom? With a woman whom he did not know, did not understand, did not love…. Did he not love her? His every drop of blood rose up against him. Love is too faint a word to express the river of fire that rushed through him when he thought of her. It was not love, it was a thousand times a greater thing than love…. He was in a whirl all through the night. He got up, dipped his face in the icy water, gasped, and shuddered. The crisis came to a head in an attack of fever.
When he got up, aching all over, he thought that she, even more than he, must be overwhelmed with shame. He went to the window. The sun was shining down upon the dazzling snow. In the garden Anna was hanging out the clothes on a line. She was engrossed in her work, and seemed to be in no wise put out. She had a dignity in her carriage and her gesture which was quite new to him, and made him, unconsciously, liken her to a moving statue.
* * * * *
They met again at lunch. Braun was away for the whole day. Christophe could not have borne meeting him. He wanted to speak to Anna. But they were not alone: the servant kept going and coming: they had to keep guard on themselves. In vain did Christophe try to catch Anna's eye. She did not look at him or at anything. There was no indication of inward ferment: and always in her smallest movement there was the unaccustomed assurance and nobility. After lunch he hoped they would have an opportunity of speaking: but the servant dallied over clearing away; and when they went into the next room she contrived to follow them: she always had something to fetch or to bring: she stayed bustling in the passage near the half-open door which Anna showed no hurry to shut: it looked as though she were spying on them. Anna sat by the window with her everlasting sewing. Christophe leaned back in an armchair with his back to the light, and a book on his knee which he did not attempt to read. Anna could only see his profile, and she noticed the torment in his face as he looked at the wall: and she gave a cruel smile. From the roof of the house and the tree in the garden the melting snow trickled down into the gravel with a thin tinkling noise. Some distance away was the laughter of children chasing each other in the street and snowballing. Anna seemed to be half-asleep. The silence was torture to Christophe: it hurt him so that he could have cried out.
At last the servant went downstairs and left the house. Christophe got up, turned to Anna, and was about to say: