A heavy shadow lifted from
her; it was a deliverance. "Good-bye" was said--was over; that pain was
done--now for the next, now for the first of the days without him. She
had slipped over the portal of one sorrow to arrive at another; but she
felt the change, and her misery lightened. This half-happiness lasted
her all the morning.
She moved out of Amiens upon the St. Quentin road, and was almost beyond
the town before she thought of buying food for the day. Unjustly,
violently, she reflected: "What a hurry to leave me! He did not ask if
I had food, or petrol, or a map--"
But she knew in her heart that it was because he was young and in
trouble, and had left her quickly, blindly, as eager as she to loosen
that violent pain.
She bought a loaf of bread, a tin of potted meat, an orange and a small
cheese, and drove on upon the road until she came to Warfusee. Wherever
her thoughts fell, wherever her eye lay, his personality gnawed within
her--and nowhere upon her horizon could she find anything that would do
instead. Julien, who had moved off down the street in Amiens, went
moving off down the street of her endless thought.
"I have only just left him! Can't I go back?" And this cry, carried out
in the nerves of her foot, slowed the car up at the side of the road.
She looked back--no smoke darkened the landscape.
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