After the fête, the school drops into two months of real work, the only genuine working months of the year, with examinations and prizes piled into the end of them. Lucy's share is to put some English into ninety minds and ninety mouths. On the day itself the dress is grave and close, no gauze and no blue streamers. Monsieur Paul examines everything himself. He will not share the estrade. Madame Beck would have liked the geography, which she teaches well, and is made to yield to her kinsman. English is the one subject he cannot take. The evening before, he joins Lucy in the forbidden alley, cigar at his lips, paletôt hanging dark, and accuses her of savouring the chance to reign beside him. She does not. School triumphs are cold to her, and she likes his jealousy only because it is artless and unreasonable, never hypocritical. She asks whether her turn will come when the room is empty or when it is tired. He says people like her must be kept down, that others see a colourless shadow and he does not. She tells him the feeling he saw in her acting was abstract. She hated the part. She does not know tomorrow's audience. He offers to take the English examination off her hands, then admits he would fail, knowing only a few mangled phrases. If Madame consents, Lucy will gladly give the whole thing up. He smokes, turns, and asks for her hand. The spite leaves his face. They will be friends, not rivals. He will choose a good moment and help her, because she is a stranger who must earn her bread. She says she would rather have a friend than a triumph. The examination goes well. He keeps his word. Prizes are given. The school breaks up.
Then the long vacation. On the first day Madame Beck goes to her children at the sea. The teachers go to family or friends. The professors leave, some for Paris, some for the coast, and Monsieur Paul for Rome. The house stays empty except for Lucy, a servant, and a poor deformed pupil whose stepmother will not have her home. Employment had been a prop. Without it Lucy sinks. Eight weeks look unsurvivable. She will not lodge the hopes that knock, for fear of presumption, and the refusal costs her tears. The first month is long, black, and heavy. The pupil is not unhappy. She wants food and sun, or fire, and her weak mind sleeps. Three weeks are hot and fair. The fourth and fifth are storm, and the storm crushes Lucy worse than the calm. She prays, and feels Fate as a permanent foe, not because she accuses God of injustice, but because she believes some lives are appointed to suffer and hers is one. An aunt finally comes and takes the pupil away. The charge had been heavy. Lucy could not take her past the garden or leave her a minute, and some of the care needed a nurse's nerve. Even so, that duty never wrung her heart as the solitude did.
Alone, she walks. At first she stays near the Rue Fossette. Then she passes the gates, the cemeteries, the farms, and goes on through lanes and little woods, out at dawn of the day and back by moonlight, driven by a famine for company. She pictures the others: Madame Beck at a watering-place, Zélie in Paris, Ginevra carried south through harvest and vintage, and she builds Ginevra into a heroine followed by true love, never alone, grateful in secret. One day she catches the illusion and knows her nerves are overstretched. There is no way to keep well. A day and a night of agony end in illness. She takes to her bed. Indian summer closes. For nine dark wet days she lies in a fever of nerves and blood. Sleep will not come, except once, in anger, with a dream that lasts barely fifteen minutes by the clock of St Jean Baptiste and feels like a visitation. A black cup is forced to her lips, filled from a sea with no bottom. In it the well-loved dead meet her elsewhere and are alienated. She has no motive to recover, and she cannot bear the voice in which Death dares her to come. Prayer shrinks to one sentence: from her youth up she has suffered God's terrors with a troubled mind. Goton brings tea and urges a doctor. Lucy will not call one.
One evening, sane enough to dress and to put on a warm cloak, she cannot bear the dormitory, where the white beds have become spectres. The house roof feels like a tomb slab. She sets out for a quiet hill beyond the city. Church bells stop her, and she goes in to the salut, kneeling on the stone in the purple gloom of an old church. When the service ends, those who remain are there to confess. A pale lady beside her says she is not ready, and Lucy, obedient, goes to the box. She does not know the formula. She says she is a Protestant. The priest turns. He is a Frenchman, grey, not unkind. He asks why she has come. She tells him she is perishing for a word of advice, that she has been alone and ill. It is not a crime. He is taken unawares, and the mere pouring out solaces her. He says such a mind finds rest in retreat, that these pains are messengers back to the true Church, and that she must not return to this cold building. She is to come at ten the next morning to his house in the Rue des Mages. She bows, draws her veil, and goes. She will not keep that appointment. His kindness could move her, and she can imagine the cell of a Carmelite convent at the end of it. She keeps a grateful memory of the man and will not put herself in his reach. Night has come. The wild wish for the hill has softened, and she turns, as she thinks, toward the Rue Fossette. She is in the old quarter, weak, lost, and unwilling to ask the way. The wind returns with rain and hail. She wishes for wings. Near a great porch she grows colder and more powerless, the spire goes black, and instead of sinking on the steps she pitches into a dark she does not remember.
