Tell me who it
is!"
And with the extraordinary fortitude common to fanatics and furious
women, she smiled and answered:
"Perhaps! _Tout passe, mon cher._"
It was a cheap and melodramatic bit of acting, and any unprejudiced
onlooker must have seen the agony in her face, but Joyselle was blinded
by his own pain and fled from the room without another word.
She heard a door slam and knew that he had gone out. And the world came
to an end for her.
It was about six o'clock, and Tommy had gone out with Theo. They would
not be back until about eight.
Felicite, too, was out. She was alone. She saw Papillon, who was sitting
up, looking at her with a world of sympathy in the cock of his ear.
Suddenly Brigit burst into tears, nervous, hysterical, noisy sobbing, as
she had done that day in the olive grove at the Villa Arcadie. She had
been living under great nervous strain for months, and these breakdowns
were of appalling violence. She _could_ not stop crying, and she could
not reason and tell herself that he would come back and forgive her.
All she could realise was her hideous misery and sense of desolation.
She was utterly alone, she was hungry, she was cold, she was hopeless.
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