But when they met accidentally, and he saw her walking beside Alan, at this moment, in the glance he threw at her, Sabina saw that he had succeeded in shifting the shame and that now what he felt was: "You're a bad woman," and that he would never come back to her. Only the poison remained, without hope of the counter-poison.

Alan left, and Sabina stayed with the hope of seeing John again. She sought him vainly at bars, restaurants, movie houses and at the beach. She inquired at the place where he rented his bicycle: they had not seen him but he still had his bicycle.

In desperation she inquired at the house where he rented a room. The room was paid for the next week, but he had not been there for three days and the woman was concerned because John's father had been telephoning every day.

The last time he had been seen was at the bar, with a group of strangers who had driven away with him.

Sabina felt she should return to New York and forget him, but his eager face and the distress in his eyes made this act seem one of desertion.

At other moments the pleasure he had given her ignited her body like flowing warm mercury darting through the veins. The memory of it flowed through the waves when she swam, and the waves seemed like his hands, or the form of his body in her hands.

She fled from the waves and his hands. But when she lay on the warm sand, it was his body again on which she lay; it was his dry skin and his swift elusive movements slipping through her fingers, shifting beneath her breasts. She fled from the sand of his caresses.

But when she bicycled home, she was racing him, she heard his merry challenges, faster—faster—faster in the wind, his face pursued her in flight or she pursued his face.

That night she raised her face to the moon, and the gesture awakened the pain, because to receive his kiss she had had to raise her face this way, but with the support of his two hands. Her mouth opened to receive his kiss once more but closed on emptiness. She almost shouted out with pain, shouted at the moon, the deaf, impassible goddess of desire shining down mockingly at an empty night, an empty bed.

She decided to pass once more by his house, although it was late, although she dreaded to see once more the empty dead face of his window.

His window was alight and open!

Sabina stood under it and whispered his name. She was hidden by a bush. She dreaded that anyone else in the house should hear her. She dreaded the eyes of the world upon a woman standing under a young man's window.

"John! John!"

He leaned out of the window, his hair tousled, and even in the moonlight she could see his face was burning and his eyes hazy.