During the afternoon she remained undetectable, which was a tour de force at St. Jean-les-Flots, where the landscape was a successful conspiracy against concealment, and a sunshade could be seen for miles.  Maurice had a tiresome feeling that she was lying out somewhere with that horrible sunshade over her head and a novel by Gyp on her lap.  Had she, he wondered, ever read any of his books?  Perhaps when she found out his name she would come up to him and say:  “Are you the Mr. Maurice Van Trean?” And when he had bowed in the affirmative, she would add that she liked “Sur les Rives” best of his books—­“she had read them all many times—­and especially that marvellous description of Camille’s return to her husband.”

Maurice walked for miles down the hard glaring white road.  It was the most uncomfortable thing he could think of doing, and when you are determined to enjoy nothing there is a certain voluptuous satisfaction in a maximum of unpleasantness.  The air was burning and solid.  An occasional convolvulus drowned in dust straggled in weary clinging grace by the roadside—­a pathetic symbol, he reflected, of the pale refined irrelevant women who fade ineffectually beside the highways of life.  He thought of Marthe with her urgent pulsating rhythm, the rhythm he remembered bitterly, that had brought him here.  He wished vindictively that she were beside him, the hard burning surface of the road biting through the soles of her shoes.  He would walk on and on till there were blisters on her feet and her steps were lagging.  His teeth were set in the grim satisfaction of revenge.

“This is the country,” he would say.  “Do you feel the health-giving sea breeze you told me about?”

He stopped suddenly.  Walking towards him was the lady.  The offensive sunshade was over her head, but her veil was up.  She was, he supposed, forty-six—­no, forty-four.  Her eyes were wide apart, dark and indolent and long—­brown or blue they might have been.  Her face was wide and so was her mouth with lips like curtains drawn across the teeth.  Her cheek-bones were high and her skin, like marshmallow, was marbled with the bright yellow lights and bright blue shadows of early afternoon.  There was a curious grace about her broad solid figure, an unhurried indifferent grace, as if she said to herself, “I shall please at my own time.”  She was not pretty.  Her clothes belonged to her as essentially as her limbs.

Maurice took off his hat.

“Forgive me, Madame, but I think that we are both living at the Hotel Bungalow.”

“I think so, too,” she said drily.

He thought that she thought that he was taking a liberty, which made him suppose that she was not quite a lady, which made him accuse himself of vulgarity.

And then she laughed, and his accusations, both of her and of himself, fled.

They walked back together and he explained to her just how much he hated the sea, the heat, the Hotel Bungalow, the cook, and Marie Aimee’s footsteps.  He explained how anxious he had been about her—­how he had longed to see her face—­how much her sunshade had depressed him—­how her lace veil had been a personal enemy.