A beetle dropped from the vine on to the table, close to the beating hand. Madame Lemaire started violently. She got up, and went to stand in the entrance of the arbour. Marseilles was gone now. Africa was there.
For ten years she had been looking down the road. She looked down it once more.
It was the wonderful evening hour when Africa seems to lift itself toward the light, reluctant to be given to the darkness. Very far one could see, and with an almost supernatural distinctness. Yet Madame Lemaire strained her eyes, as people do at dusk when they strive to pierce a veil of gathering darkness.
What was coming along the road?
Her gaze travelled onwards over the hard and barren plain till it reached the green crops, on and on past the tents of the Spahis’ encampment, near which rose a trail of smoke into the lucent air; farther still, farther and farther, until the whiteness narrowed towards the mountains, and at last was lost to sight.
And this evening, perhaps because she longed so much for something, for anything, there was nothing on the road. It was a white emptiness under the setting sun.
Then the woman felt frantic, and she beat her hands together, and she cried aloud:
“If the Devil himself would only come along the road and ask me to go from this cursed hole of a place, I’d go with him! I’d go! I’d go!”
She repeated it shrilly, making wild gestures with her hands towards the desert. Her face was twisted awry. She looked just then like a desperate hag of a woman.
But it was the girl of Marseilles who was crying out in her. It was Marie Bretelle who was demanding the joys she had flung away in her youth for the sake of a handsome face.