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“Well,” said Bouvier, recovering himself a little, “if you must know, we were talking about the Devil.”

The woman stared and gave the table a shake. Some of her husband’s wine was spilled over it.

“The Devil take you!” he bawled with sudden fury.

“I only wish he would!”

The two men jumped back as if a viper of the sands had suddenly reared up its thin head between them.

“I only wish he would!”

It was Marie Bretelle who had spoken, the girl of Marseilles, who still lived in the body of Marie Lemaire. But it was Marie Lemaire from whom the two men shrank away—Marie Lemaire changed, startling, terrible, her haggard face furious with expression, her thin hands clutching at the edge of the table, from which the wine-bottle had fallen, to be smashed at their feet.

For a moment there was a dead silence succeeding that second shrill cry. Then Lemaire scrambled up heavily from his chair.

“What do you mean?” he stammered. “What do you mean?”

And then she told him, like a fury, and with the words which had surely been accumulating in her mind, like water behind a dam, for ten years. She told him what she had wanted, and what she had had. And when at last she had finished telling him, she stood for a minute, making mouths at him in silence, as if she still had something to say, some final word of summing up.