That alarm had been quenched by Angela's manner during
the hour that followed and during their short talk in the evening. This
evening was to be forever memorable, for it had brought with it the
revelation which still, at moments, suddenly made Bernard tremble; but
it had also brought him the assurance that Angela cared as little as
possible for anything that a chance acquaintance might have said about
her. It is all the more singular, therefore, that one evening, after he
had been at Blanquais a fortnight, a train of thought should suddenly
have been set in motion in his mind. It was kindled by no outward
occurrence, but by some wandering spark of fancy or of memory, and the
immediate effect of it was to startle our hero very much as he had been
startled on the evening I have described. The circumstances were the
same; he had wandered down to the beach alone, very late, and he stood
looking at the duskily-tumbling sea. Suddenly the same voice that had
spoken before murmured another phrase in the darkness, and it rang upon
his ear for the rest of the night. It startled him, as I have said,
at first; then, the next morning, it led him to take his departure for
Paris. During the journey it lingered in his ear; he sat in the corner
of the railway-carriage with his eyes closed, abstracted, on purpose to
prolong the reverberation.
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