I have contemplated the
gravel at my feet; and suddenly I start, for I understand that my eyes
were looking for the marks of our footsteps, in spite of the stone, in
spite of the sand.

After the solemnity of a long silence, Marie's face takes on a look of
defeat, and suddenly she begins to cry. The tears which fill her--for
one always weeps in full, drop on to her knees. And through her sobs
there fall from her wet lips words almost shapeless, but desperate and
fierce, as a burst of forced laughter.

"It's all over!" she cries.

* * * * * *

I have put my arm round her waist, and I am shaken by the sorrow which
agitates her chest and throat, and sometimes shakes her rudely, the
sorrow which does not belong to me, which belongs to no one, and is
like a divinity.

She becomes composed. I take her hand. In a weak voice she calls some
memories up--this and that--and "one morning----" She applies herself
to it and counts them. I speak, too, gently. We question each other.
"Do you remember?"--"Oh, yes." And when some more precise and intimate
detail prompts the question we only reply, "A little." Our separation
and the great happenings past which the world has whirled have made the
past recoil and shaped a deep ditch. Nothing has changed; but when we
look we see.

Once, after we had recalled to each other an enchanted summer evening,
I said, "We loved each other," and she answered, "I remember."

I call her by her name, in a low voice, so as to draw her out of the
dumbness into which she is falling.

She listens to me, and then says, placidly, despairingly,
"'_Marie_,'--you used to say it like that. I can't realize that I had
the same name."

A few moments later, as we talked of something else, she said to me at
last, "Ah, that day we had dreams of travel, about our plans--_you were
there_, sitting by my side."

In those former times we lived. Now we hardly live any more, since we
have lived. They who we were are dead, for we are here. Her glances
come to me, but they do not join again the two surviving voids that we
are; her look does not wipe out our widowhood, nor change anything.
And I, I am too imbued with clear-sighted simplicity and truth to
answer "no" when it is "yes." In this moment by my side Marie is like
me.

The immense mourning of human hearts appears to us. We dare not name
it yet; but we dare not let it not appear in all that we say.

*