They were talking again. He approached bent double. Then a cry rose from under the branches close to him. That cry! It was one of those he had come to know from their most tender, their most passionate love-making. He crept even closer, drawn irresistibly, blindly, despite himself … and then he saw them.

Oh! If only the other person had been a man! But this! He was transfixed by the loathsome sight before him. He remained there overwhelmed by shock. It was as though he had just stumbled upon the mutilated body of a loved one. It was a crime against nature, a monstrous and wicked desecration. Suddenly flashing into his mind’s eye this time came the image of the little fish whose entrails he had earlier seen ripped out. Madeleine was moaning ‘Pauline’, exactly as she used to moan ‘Paul’ to him. Hearing it, he felt such pain that he turned and fled. He hurtled into one tree and ricocheted into another, fell over a root, picked himself up and ran again until suddenly he found himself at the edge of the river. The raging torrent made whirls and eddies on which the moonbeams now played. On the opposite side the bank loomed over the water like a cliff, leaving a wide band of black at its foot from which the sound of the swirling water rose in the darkness. Clearly visible on the other side were the weekend homes at Croissy.

Paul saw all this as if in a dream or as something remembered. He was no longer thinking. He understood nothing now. Everything including his own existence seemed vague, distant, forgotten and finished. There was the river. Did he know what he was doing? Did he want to die? He had lost his mind. Nevertheless he turned round to face the island where she was. Into the night in which the faint but persistent beat of the dance-band still throbbed back and forth, he shouted, ‘Madeleine!’

His heart-rending call pierced the great silence of the sky and echoed, lost in the distance. Then with a furious animal-like leap he plunged into the river. The water splashed then closed over the spot setting up a series of ever-widening circles which rippled in the moonlight as far as the opposite bank. The two women had heard. Madeleine got up and said, ‘That’s Paul.’ A suspicion arose suddenly in her mind. ‘He’s drowned himself,’ she said and rushed towards the bank where Pauline caught up with her.

A heavy punt with two men in it was circling over and over around the same spot. One of the men rowed while the other was plunging a long pole into the water evidently looking for something. Pauline shouted: ‘What’s happened? What are you doing?’

A stranger’s voice cried: ‘A man’s just drowned himself.’