At the railway station M. Mauperin saw the doctor getting into the train. He got into another compartment, as he did not feel as though he had the strength to speak to him or even look at him.

On arriving in Paris he went to a chemist's and was told that it would take three hours to make up the prescription. "Three hours!" he exclaimed, but at heart he was glad that it would be so long. It would give him some time before returning to the house. When once he was in the street he walked fast. He had no consecutive ideas, but a sort of heavy, ceaseless throbbing in his head like the throb of neuralgia. His sensations were blunted, as though he were in a stupor. He saw nothing but the legs of people walking and the wheels of the carriages turning round. His head felt heavy and at the same time empty. As he saw other people walking, he walked too. The passers-by appeared to be taking him with them, and the crowd to be carrying him along in its stream. Everything looked faint, indistinct, and of a neutral tint, as things do the day after any wild excitement or intoxication. The light and noise of the streets he seemed to see and hear in a dream. He would not have known there was any sun if it had not been for the white trousers the policemen were wearing, which had caught his eye several times.

It was all the same to him whether he went to the right or left. He neither wanted anything nor had he the energy to do anything. He was surprised to see the movement around him—people who were hurrying along, walking quickly, on their way to something. He had had neither aim nor object in life for the last few hours. It seemed to him as though the world had come to an end, as though he were a dead man in the midst of the life and activity of Paris. He tried to think of anything in all that might happen to a man capable of moving him, of touching him in any way, and he could not conceive of anything which could reach to the depths of his despair.

Sometimes, as though he were answering inquiries about his daughter, he would say aloud, "Oh, yes, she is very ill!" and it was as though the words he had uttered had been said by some one else at his side. Often a work-girl without any hat, a pretty young girl with a round waist, gay and healthy with the rude health of her class, would pass by him. He would cross the street that he might not see her again. He was furious just for a minute with all these people who passed him, with all these useless lives. They were not beloved as his daughter was, and there was no need for them to go on living. He went into one of the public gardens and sat down. A child put some of its little sand-pies on to the tails of his coat; other children getting bolder approached him with all the daring of sparrows. Presently, feeling slightly embarrassed, they left their little spades, stopped playing and stood round, looking shyly and sympathetically, like so many men and women in miniature, at this tall gentleman who was so sad. M. Mauperin rose and left the garden.

His tongue was furred and his throat dry. He went into a cafÉ, and opposite him was a little girl wearing a white jacket and a straw hat. Her frock was short, showing her little firm, bare legs with their white socks. She was moving about all the time, climbing and jumping on to her father and standing straight up on his knees. She had a little cross round her neck. Every few minutes her father begged her to keep still.

M. Mauperin closed his eyes; he could see his own little daughter just as she had been at six years old. Presently he opened a review, The Illustration, and bent over it, trying to make himself look at the pictures, and when he reached the last page he set himself to find out one of the enigmas.

When M. Mauperin lifted his head again he wiped his face with his handkerchief. He had made out the enigma: "Against death there is no appeal."