‘Me? You never asked me. It was hardly up to me to make a declaration.’

At this he took a step towards her.

‘Tell me … tell me … you remember that day Sandres fell asleep after lunch … when we went as far as that bend together … ?’

He waited for her to speak. She had stopped laughing and was looking him straight in the eye.

‘Of course I remember.’

He went on, trembling slightly: ‘Well … that day … if I’d shown a bit of initiative … what … what would you have done?’

She began to smile the smile of a happy woman who has no regrets in life and replied frankly, with a touch of irony in her voice: ‘I would have been yours of course.’

With this she turned on her heel and fled back to her jam.

Saval went out into the street again, pole-axed as if by the news of some disaster. Looking straight ahead, he strode like a robot through the rain down to the river. When he reached the bank he turned right and followed it as if driven by some instinct. His clothes were wringing wet and his hat, limp and shapeless as a rag, dripped like a roof. On and on he walked until he came to the place where they had lunched on that distant day he remembered with such anguish. There, surrounded by the leafless trees, he sat down and allowed his own tears to fall.

MINOR TRAGEDY

Half the pleasure of travel, surely, is the possibility of the chance meeting. Which of us has not to our great delight discovered 500 miles away from home a fellow-Parisian, say, or someone we went to the school with or who lives in the same county? Who has not spent the night wide awake as the stagecoach jingles its way through places as yet untouched by the railway, while sitting next to an unknown young woman glimpsed only by lamplight as she entered the carriage outside a white-painted house in some little town or other? When morning comes and one’s ears are still full of the sound of harness bells and the shattering rattle of window panes, what a delightful feeling it is to see one’s charmingly dishevelled companion open her eyes and look about her. We watch as she runs her dainty little fingers through her tousled hair, feels to make sure that her bodice has not twisted around too much in the night, sets the waist to rights and smoothes out the creases in her skirt. And she of course steals a glance, albeit of cold curiosity, at you, before settling herself back into her corner and appearing totally absorbed by the passing scenery.