But no one who listened ever shared her sudden gaiety: in their glances she read condemnations. Her laughter seemed a desecration, a mockery of what should be considered tragic. She could see in their eyes the wish that she should fall from this incandescent trapeze on which she walked with the aid of delicate Japanese paper umbrellas, for no guilty party has a right to such adroitness and to live only by its power to balance over the rigidities of life which dictated a choice, according to its taboos against multiple lives. No one would share with her this irony and playfulness against the rigidities of life itself; no one would applaud when she succeeded by her ingenuity in defeating life's limitations.

These moments when she reached a humorous peak above the morass of dangers, the smothering swamps of guilt, were the ones when everyone left her alone, unabsolved; they seemed to be awaiting her hour of punishment after living like a spy in the house of many loves, for avoiding exposure, for defeating the sentinels watching definite boundaries, for passing without passports and permits from one love to another.

Every spy's life had ended in ignominious death.

She stood waiting for the light to change at the crossroad of the beach town.

What startled Sabina and made her examine the cyclist waiting beside her was the extraordinary brilliance of his large eyes. They shone with a wet, silver sparkle which was almost frightening because it highlighted the tumultuous panic close to the surface. The molten silver was disquieting, like blinding reflectors on the edge of annihilation by darkness. She was caught in the contagion of this panic, the transparent film of precious stone trembling, about to be sucked in by a hidden cyclone.

It was only later that she noticed the delicately chiseled face, the small nose, the mouth modeled by gentleness, unrelated to the deeper disturbance of the eyes, a very young man's mouth, a pure design on the face not yet enslaved by his feelings. These feelings not yet known to him, had not yet acid-bitten through his body. His gestures were free and nimble, the gestures of an adolescent, restless and light. The eyes alone contained all the fever.

He had driven his bicycle like a racing car or an airplane.

He had come down upon her as if he did not see trees, cars, people, and almost overlooked the stop signal.

To free herself of the shock his eyes had given her she sought to diminish their power by thinking: "They are just beautiful eyes, they are just passionate eyes, young men rarely have such passionate eyes, they are just more alive than other eyes." But no sooner had she said this to herself to exorcise his spell than a deeper instinct in her added: "He has seen something other young men have not seen."