Now, looking down at a gray city river, the dream eddied into her mind, then slipped out of reach. She felt a terrible despondency, a conviction that she could understand those events no better than she could understand that impulse which had come to her out of the air and had made it possible, just hours before, to pull a trigger, fire a weapon, end a life. Turning away from the flux and current of the water, she fixed her eyes on the loveliness of the particular buildings in front of her as their outlines emerged in the strengthening light. If understanding and reason failed her, she thought, beginning to walk again, then duty and precept and principle would have to suffice.

I have no choice, she said to herself; I have no choice; I have made my promises, I am almost a wife.

She increased her pace, repeating this litany to herself. She loved Pascal, and with repetition, this litany gathered strength. By the time she reached the hotel, she was convinced this strength was more than sufficient to carry her through any parting from Rowland McGuire—and a parting, a final and absolute one, she also planned and scripted as she walked.

But confronted with him later that day, across the nervous and narrow expanse of her hotel room, she could see only the banalities and untruths of that carefully prepared script. One look at his face told her: that speech had been contrived for a different and lesser man, some man she had allowed her mind to invent. It would be unpardonable to speak it now, an insult to him, and also to herself.

She was afraid to look at him, and terrified of what would happen if he touched her. So she edged away from him as he stood awkwardly by the door, wearing an overcoat, booked on a London flight. She turned her face to the window with its view of Paris lights. Her carefully stacked arguments fell apart in her mind. I have no choice, she repeated silently and fiercely to herself—but even that sentence, so reassuring, so clearly true a few hours earlier, now failed her. Choice entered the room with him; his physical proximity made every certainty shift.

She turned finally to look at him. He was frowning. He glanced back at the door as if regretting he had come here, then he began speaking. Gini could scarcely hear his words, let alone make sense of them, though their sense was clear enough. She knew at once, instinctively and with absolute certainty, that he, too, had planned some careful exodus speech, and was duly beginning upon it.

It would have been easier for them both had he been able to continue with it. But the increasing strain was evident, in his gestures and tone, in his pale, tense face. He negotiated, by sheer force of will, just three sentences. Then abruptly, with a sudden angry gesture, he stopped.

That occasion was not the first on which Rowland had seen Gini that day, and their previous encounters had given him, he realized now, a misplaced confidence. They had met first that morning, in the doorway of this same room, when their conversation had been brief: stiff inquiries on Rowland’s part as to her welfare, and Lamartine’s; equally stiff reassurances on Gini’s part. Rowland’s mind burned with the unsaid, but a night spent working, filing copy, had left him convinced that he possessed the resolve to act. That afternoon, when to his surprise Gini insisted on working with him, filing more copy on a story that even blasé Max admitted to be a scoop, he had remained obstinately convinced he had the willpower to negotiate this.