Damaris went out blindly, down the staircase and across the vestibule and halls into the open air.

She had no knowledge of what she did; the serving-men looked at her and then at each other, and laughed, and whispered some coarse things, but no one attempted to arrest her steps; on the contrary, they put her right when she mistook her way in the corridor, and almost shoved her into the street, where the light of day was fading.

She was strongly made in body and in mind, and in all the tumult of her thoughts, the sickness of her shame, she did not grow faint, or forget her road, or fall upon the stones, over which her feet were dragged so wearily.

She found the streets which led to the station of the West, and sat down in the waiting-chamber, and heard the roar of Paris go on round her like the roaring of wild beasts calling for food: that those beasts had not devoured her was due to him; she did not reproach him or forget her debt to him, only she wished that he had let her die that night upon the bridge.

The doors flew open, the bells rang, the crowds hastened; without any conscious action on her part she was pushed with the others to the wicket, paid the coins they asked her for, and found her way to a seat in the crowded waggons.

The train moved. Soon the cold country air of evening blowing through an open window revived her, and brought her a clearer sense of where she was, of what had happened. She saw always that cold, still, regal figure looking down on her with such ineffable disdain; she heard always that chill, languid, contemptuous voice, sweet as music, cruel as the knife which severs the cord of life.

'She does not believe,' she muttered again and again. 'She will never believe.'

Those who were in the carriage with her heard the broken stupid words said over and over again, while her great eyes looked out, wide opened and startled, into the shadows of the descending night.

One or two of them spoke roughly to her, being afraid of her; then she was silent, vaguely understanding that they thought her strange and odd.

She leaned in a corner and shrank from their comments and their gaze.

It was now quite dark; the flickering lamplight seemed to wane and oscillate before her eyes; she had not touched food or water for many hours; her throat was dry, her hands were hot, her head felt light; she had done all she could and had failed. The only thing she had gained was a knowledge which seemed to eat her very soul away with its shame and misery.

She was so young that she did not know that if she had patience to live through this agony it would cease in time, and grow less terrible to her with every year which should pass over her head. She did not know the solace that comes with the mere passage of the seasons; to her the shame, the torture she endured were eternal.

She had taken his money innocently, ignorantly indeed, honestly believing it to be her own; but she understood now why to his wife she seemed only a wretched paid creature of hazard; she understood now why the Princess de Laon had spoken to her as to one of whose avarice and whose vileness there was no doubt.

To the haughty, frank innocent soul of the child it was such unspeakable degradation that it seemed to stop the very pulses of life in her.

She could have torn the clothes off her body because they had been bought with this money she had ignorantly accepted as her own.

Not for one moment did she do him the wrong that his wife had done him; she never doubted his motives, or thought that any intention save that of the kindest and most chivalrous compassion had been at the root of his generosity to her. Her mind was too intrinsically noble, her instincts were too pure and untainted by suspicion, for any baser supposition to attach itself to him in her thoughts, even in the moment of her greatest suffering.

Only she wished—ah, God! how she wished—that he had left her to die on the bridge in that summer night.

Intense pride had always been existent beneath her ardent and careless temperament; the stubborn self-will of the peasant united to the finer, more impersonal, pride derived from a great race. She had been always taught to suffice for herself, to repel assistance as indignity, to hold herself the equal of all living creatures; and now what was she?—only what Jean BÉrarde, had he been living, would have driven out of his presence as a beggar, only what all the labourers in the fields of the vale of Chevreuse would have the right to hoot after as she passed them. Her imagination distorted and her sensitiveness exaggerated all the debt she owed to Othmar; to herself she seemed nothing better than any one of those wretched paupers who stretched their hands out to him as he passed. The shame of it made all the devotion she bore to him seem a horror, a disgrace, a thing cankered and corrupt, which he must despise utterly if he knew aught of it. And what should he know? What should he care? What could she be in his sight except a friendless, lonely thing, whom he had saved from want, as he might save any ragged, homeless, child who asked for a sou from him in the streets.

She loved him with the passion of Juliet, of Francesca, of Mignon, and she found herself so disgraced in her own sight that nothing she could ever do, it seemed to her, would make any utterance from her, even of gratitude, worth the breath spent in speaking it. To him and to his wife she would be for ever, all their lives long, only a peasant who had not had strength or courage to earn her own daily bread.

The cold scorn which had gazed at her from the eyes of his wife seemed to pierce through and through the very core and centre of her life. She had dreamed of being great in this woman's sight, of compelling her admiration, her applause, even her envy!—and all the while she had been nothing more than any dog which lived on the food thrown from their table.

The train went on through the descending darkness of the night, and the scent of the wind blowing over grass-lands and wheat-fields came to her in her trance, and filled her with a strange dumb longing to be put away for ever in silence under the cool and kindly earth, the budding leaves, the sprouting corn. The aged hate the thought of death, and fear and shun it; but for the young it has no terrors, and in their pain it always beckons, with a smile, to them to rest in the arms of the great Madre Natura. Death seemed to her the only stream which could wash her soul white again from the indignity it had, all unconsciously, accepted. A passion which was hopeless and cruel, and ashamed of its own force, burned up her young heart like fire. Dead, only, it seemed to him that she might keep some place in his compassion and his remembrance without indignity.

She descended at the familiar road-side of Trappes, and passed through the wicket, and took her way through the country paths she knew so well. It was not yet a year since they had first brought her there, and she had laughed with joy to see the country sights and hear the country sounds once more. Now they only hurt her with an intolerable pain.

The night was dark, and a fine slight rain was falling, but she was not conscious of it. She found her way by instinct, as a blind dog finds his; it was long, and went over fields and pastures, but she kept straight on unerringly, going home, why she knew not, for she felt that she would never dwell there another day: now that she knew.

Now that she knew, she could not have touched a coin of that silver and gold which lay in her drawer in her room at Les Hameaux; she would not have eaten a crust of the bread which had been purchased with it. She had no idea what she would do; she was alone once more, as utterly alone as she had been when her solitary boat had been launched on the world of waters, to reach a haven or to founder as it might. Her only instinct was to go anywhere on the earth, or under the earth, where the eyes of Othmar's wife could never find her in their merciless scorn.

Everything had gone from her, all her dreams of a future, all her love for art and for the poets, all her bright and buoyant courage, all her innocent and idealised ambitions: they were all gone for evermore; she was alone without that companionship of a fearless hope which had sustained her strength upon the lonely seas, and in the hell of Paris. She had no hope now of any kind; and youth can no more live without it, than flowers can live without the air of heaven. She was weakened from fasting, and her brain was giddy; as she walked on over the rough ground through the chill rain, she thought she was on the island; she thought her grandfather was calling to her not to loiter, she thought dead Catherine was stretching out her arms to her, and crying, 'Hasten! hasten!' She smelt the odour of the orange flowers, she heard the sound of the sea washing up amongst the pebbles and the sand—'if I could only die there, if I could only die there,' she thought dully, as she stumbled through the wet grass and the fields of colza.

Death would be so easy and so sweet, amongst the blue bright rolling water, in the scented southerly air, under the broad white moon of her own skies.

She came with a shock to a knowledge that she was entering the village of Les Hameaux as a peasant driving furiously shrieked to her to move out of his road, and in the cabins around the lights twinkled as the people of the house sat at their suppers of soup and bread. Burning tears rushed to her eyes and fell down her cheeks. She knew that she would never see the shores of Bonaventure again in life.

She went through the village with weary steps, she was very tired, her wet clothes clung to her, her face was white and drawn, her hands and her throat were hot. Some people leaning against the doorposts of their houses looked at her, and wondered to see her out so late, so wet, so jaded, and all alone. She went through the hamlet without pausing and without hearing any of the words called out to her.

Outside the village and on the road to the farm of the Croix Blanche, there stood a lonely cottage, half hidden in elder trees and built two centuries before with the stones and rubble of the ruins of Port Royal. A woman whom she knew dwelt there with four young children: a widow, very poor, making what living she could from poultry and from fruit; a laborious, patient, honest, and good soul, always at work in all weathers, and happy because the four fair-haired laughing children tumbled after her in the grass or in the dust.

As she passed down the road in the grey film of rain, this woman ran out of the house to her, weeping piteously, and catching at her clothes to make her stop.

'My Pierrot is dying!' she cried to her. 'He has the ball in his throat—he will be dead by dawn—for the love of God send some one to me. I am all alone.'

Damaris pausing, looked at her stupidly. Indistinctly roused from her own stupor, she was unconscious for the moment where she was or who spoke to her. The light through the open doorway streamed out into the road; she saw the wild eyes, the tearful cheeks, the dishevelled hair of the wretched mother; she understood by instinct what woe had come upon the house. Pierrot was the youngest and the prettiest of the four little children who lived huddled together, and happy under these elder trees like small unfledged birds in a nest.

'Do not come in, do not come near him,' cried the woman, 'oh, my dear, it would be death; but send some one who is old and will not mind; the old never take this sickness—and I have been all alone till I am mad. My pretty baby—the prettiest, the youngest!'

Damaris looked at her with dull, blind eyes. A strange sense of fatality came on her; here was death—not death in the clear blue water which would never more smite her limbs with its joyous blows, and rock her in the cradle of its waves; but death which would end all things, which would put her away to rest under the green earth, which would purify her from greed and from baseness in his sight. She turned and entered through the doorway of the house.

'I am not afraid,' she said to the woman. 'I will stay with Pierrot.'

The woman strove to draw her back, but she would not be dissuaded from her choice.

'If God will it, I shall die,' she thought; 'and if I die, then perhaps she will believe, and he remember me.'