I lifted my face up to
the sky. I sank back and leaned on the bed, a huge object with a vague
human shape, like a corpse. God, I was lost! I prayed to Him to have
pity on me. I thought that I was wise and content with my lot. I had
said to myself that I was free from the instinct of theft. Alas, alas,
it was not true, since I longed to take everything that was not mine.

CHAPTER II

The sound of the horn had ceased for some time. The street and the
houses had quieted down. Silence. I passed my hand over my forehead.
My fit of emotion was over. So much the better. I recovered my
balance by an effort of will-power.

I sat down at the table and took some papers out of my bag that I had
to look over and arrange.

Something spurred me on. I wanted to earn a little money. I could
then send some to my old aunt who had brought me up. She always waited
for me in the low-ceilinged room, where her sewing-machine, afternoons,
whirred, monotonous and tiresome as a clock, and where, evenings, there
was a lamp beside her which somehow seemed to look like herself.

Notes--the notes from which I was to draw up the report that would show
my ability and definitely decide whether I would get a position in
Monsieur Berton's bank--Monsieur Berton, who could do everything for me,
who had but to say a word, the god of my material life.

I started to light the lamp. I scratched a match. It did not catch
fire, the phosphorous end breaking off. I threw it away and waited a
moment, feeling a little tired.

Then I heard a song hummed quite close to my ear.

. . . . .

Some one seemed to be leaning on my shoulder, singing for me, only for
me, in confidence.

Ah, an hallucination! Surely my brain was sick--my punishment for
having thought too hard.

I stood up, and my hand clutched the edge of the table. I was
oppressed by a feeling of the supernatural. I sniffed the air, my
eyelids blinking, alert and suspicious.

The singing kept on. I could not get rid of it. My head was beginning
to go round. The singing came from the room next to mine. Why was it
so pure, so strangely near? Why did it touch me so? I looked at the
wall between the two rooms, and stifled a cry of surprise.

High up, near the ceiling, above the door, always kept locked, there
was a light. The song fell from that star.

There was a crack in the partition at that spot, through which the
light of the next room entered the night of