I was witnessing the saddest and most extraordinary relationship: unspoken love between two perfect strangers. He loved her with all the devotion of a rescued animal, constant and grateful unto death. Every day he would come and ask ‘‘How is she?’’ And as he watched her grow paler and weaker with every passing day, he would weep inconsolably.

She would say to me: ‘‘I’ve only spoken to this extraordinary man once, yet I feel I’ve known him for twenty years.’’

When they met, she would return his salutation with a charming, serious smile. I felt that this dying and rejected woman was happy to be loved in such a respectful and constant way, in this exaggeratedly romantic manner and with such unconditional devotion. And yet it was with something akin to rapture that she was determined to keep to her word. She was desperate, adamant in her refusal to receive him, to know his name or speak a word to him.

‘‘Oh no!’’ she would say, ‘‘that would spoil the very special nature of the friendship for me. We have to remain strangers to one another.’’

He himself was sufficiently quixotic not to make any attempt to approach her. He wished to keep to the very end the absurd promise he had made, never to address a single word to her. Often, during the long hours of her illness, she would rise from her chaise longue and open the curtains a chink to see if he was there beneath her window. And when she saw that he was sitting as usual, motionless on his bench, she would go back and rest with a smile on her lips.

She died one morning at about ten o’clock. As I was leaving the hotel he came up to me, his face distraught. He already knew.

‘‘I’d like to see her, just for a moment, with you there,’’ he said.

I took his arm and went back into the building. Standing at the dead woman’s bedside, he seized her hand and kissed it for the longest possible time. Then he ran off like a thing possessed.’

Again the doctor paused, then said: ‘That’s certainly the most extraordinary train story I’ve ever heard. You have to admit, men do the maddest things sometimes.’

One of the women quietly murmured: ‘Those two weren’t as mad as you might think. They were … they were …’

But she was weeping too much to go on. We changed the subject so as to take her mind off it. As a result we never did find out what she had meant to say.

REGRET