“… What about you?” he repeated it stupidly.

Joanna received the wound without a sign.

“I’ll be all right,” she heard herself say. “I can get a room at the station hotel.”

She remembered once seeing han-kari enacted in a Japanese play – remembered the actor’s queer silence when the dagger first ran into his body up to the hilt. It was a silence in which he had continued his beautifully ordered movements. Only when the dagger was withdrawn, had he lost control and expired in a bubble of blood.

Now she only wanted to be alone. Louis too, she could see, was longing to be gone from her. But he found it difficult to move.

“Joanna!” he paid her his tribute – “You are a generous woman. The most generous I ever knew.”

At that a smile twisted her mouth for a moment, and again they were standing, looking fixedly, strangely at each other. He had a moment of cowardly fondness, and took her limp hand. “After four to-morrow I should be free,” he said. “I’ll call or send a message the instant I can. I wish things were different. Do you see? But, my child,” he continued with a violent shudder, “the draught in this place! It’s icy! The old man will drop dead in a minute. There’s a cab. Hi! There! I’ll be off. Till to-morrow, old girl. Take care of yourself.”

They shook hands like acquaintances, Louis – comically, as Joanna had to think – lifting his hat. She saw him cross the pavement with a touch of his old jauntiness, and get into the cab. It rumbled away.

She walked carefully to the hotel. Unless she walked very carefully she must surely reel or fall down. It seemed to her that Louis had broken her right across with his hands. It would not do if people were to see that she was broken right across. She must keep upright till she got into a place by herself.

But even when the hotel attendant had left her alone in a great, high, inimical box of a bedroom, she continued to move with circumspection. When she unpacked her nightdress she noticed an odd thing. The low neck was threaded with a piece of mauve ribbon taken from one of her mother’s funeral wreaths. How it had ever come to be there she could not think. She must have used it unconsciously, not even knowing that she possessed it though now she recognized it at once. She let it be.