She walked slowly. The house she reached was luxurious, but as many houses in the village, without elevators. There was no one around to carry her bag. The two floors she had to climb appeared like the endless stairways in a nightmare. They would drain the very last of her strength.

But I am safe. He will be asleep. He will be happy at my coming. He will be there. He will open his arms. He will make room for me. I will no longer have to struggle.

Just before she reached the last floor she could see a thin ray of light under his door and she felt a warm joy permeate her entire body. He is there. He is awake.

As if everything else she had experienced were but ordeals and this the shelter, the place of happiness.

I can't understand what impels me to leave this, this is happiness.

When his door opened it always seemed to open upon an unchanging room. The furniture was never displaced, the lights were always diffused and gentle like sanctuary lamps.

Alan stood at the door and what she saw first of all was his smile. He had strong, very even teeth in a long and narrow head. The smile almost closed his eyes which were narrow and shed a soft fawn light. He stood very erect with an almost military bearing, and being very tall his head bent down as if from its own weight to look down upon Sabina.

He always greeted her with a tenderness which seemed to assume she had always been in great trouble. He automatically rushed to comfort and to shelter. The way he opened his arms and the tone in which he greeted her implied: "First of all I will comfort and console you, first of all I will gather you together again, you're always so battered by the world outside."

The strange, continuous, almost painful tension she felt away from him always dissolved in his presence, at his very door.

He took her valise, moving with deliberate gestures, and deposited it with care in her closet. There was a rock-like center to his movements, a sense of perfect gravitation. His emotions, his thoughts revolved around a fixed center like a well-organized planetary system.

The trust she felt in his evenly modulated voice, both warm and light, in his harmonious manners never sudden or violent, in his thoughts which he weighed before articulating, in his insights which were moderate, was so great that it resembled a total abandon of herself to him, a total giving.

In trust she flowed out to him, grateful and warm.

She placed him apart from other men, distinct and unique. He held the only fixed position in the fluctuations of her feelings.

"Tired, my little one?" he said. "Was it a hard trip? Was it a success?"