little remorse in it.  I detected no movement and heard no sound from her.  In one place a bit of the fur coat touched my cheek softly, but no forgiving hand came to rest on my bowed head.  I only breathed deeply the faint scent of violets, her own particular fragrance enveloping my body, penetrating my very heart with an inconceivable intimacy, bringing me closer to her than the closest embrace, and yet so subtle that I sensed her existence in me only as a great, glowing, indeterminate tenderness, something like the evening light disclosing after the white passion of the day infinite depths in the colours of the sky and an unsuspected soul of peace in the protean forms of life.  I had not known such quietness for months; and I detected in myself an immense fatigue, a longing to remain where I was without changing my position to the end of time.  Indeed to remain seemed to me a complete solution for all the problems that life presents—­ even as to the very death itself.

Only the unwelcome reflection that this was impossible made me get up at last with a sigh of deep grief at the end of the dream.  But I got up without despair.  She didn’t murmur, she didn’t stir.  There was something august in the stillness of the room.  It was a strange peace which she shared with me in this unexpected shelter full of disorder in its neglected splendour.  What troubled me was the sudden, as it were material, consciousness of time passing as water flows.  It seemed to me that it was only the tenacity of my sentiment that held that woman’s body, extended and tranquil above the flood.  But when I ventured at last to look at her face I saw her flushed, her teeth clenched—­it was visible—­her nostrils dilated, and in her narrow, level-glancing eyes a look of inward and frightened ecstasy.  The edges of the fur coat had fallen open and I was moved to turn away.  I had the same impression as on the evening we parted that something had happened which I did not understand; only this time I had not touched her at all.  I really didn’t understand.  At the slightest whisper I would now have gone out without a murmur, as though that emotion had given her the right to be obeyed.  But there was no whisper; and for a long time I stood leaning on my arm, looking into the fire and feeling distinctly between the four walls of that locked room the unchecked time flow past our two stranded personalities.

And suddenly she spoke.  She spoke in that voice that was so profoundly moving without ever being sad, a little wistful perhaps and always the supreme expression of her grace.  She asked as if nothing had happened: 

“What are you thinking of, amigo?”

I turned about.  She was lying on her side, tranquil above the smooth flow of time, again closely wrapped up in her fur, her head resting on the old-gold sofa cushion bearing like everything else in that room the decoratively enlaced letters of her monogram; her face a little pale now, with the crimson lobe of her ear under the tawny mist of her loose hair, the lips a little parted, and her glance of melted sapphire level and motionless, darkened by fatigue.