Notwithstanding | Page 9

sadly. He took a pained interest in the young couple, especially in Annette.
"I am not Monsieur's wife," said Annette.
The notary stared, bowed, and gathered up his papers. The doctor busied himself with the sick man, spent and livid on his pillow.
"Approach then, madame," he said, with a great respect. "It is you Monsieur needs." And he withdrew with the notary.
Annette groped her way to the bed. The room had become very dark. The floor rose in long waves beneath her feet, but she managed to reach the bed and sink down beside it.
What matter now if she were tired. She had done what he asked of her. She had not failed him. What matter if she sank deeper still, down and down, as she was sinking now.
"Annette." Dick's voice was almost extinct.
"Here."
"The wind is coming again. Across the sea, across the mountains, over the plains. It is the wind of the desert. Can't you hear it?"
She shook her head. She could hear nothing but his thin thread of voice.
"I am going with it, and this time I shan't come back. Good-bye, Annette."
"Good-bye, Dick."
His eyes dwelt on hers, with a mute appeal in them. The forebreath of the abyss was upon him, the shadow of "the outer dark."
She understood, and kissed him on the forehead with a great tenderness, and leaned her cold cheek against his.
And as she stooped she heard the mighty wind of which he spoke. Its rushing filled her ears, it filled the little chamber where those two poor things had suffered together, and had in a way ministered to each other.
And the sick-room with its gilt mirror and its tawdry wall-paper, and the evil picture never absent from Annette's brain, stooped and blended into one, and wavered together as a flame wavers in a draught, and then together vanished away.
"The wind is taking us both," Annette thought, as her eyes closed.

Chapter 6
"I was as children be Who have no care; I did not think or sigh, I did not sicken;
But lo, Love beckoned me, And I was bare, And poor and starved and dry, And fever-stricken." -- Thomas Hardy
It was five months later, the middle of February. Annette was lying in a deck-chair by the tank in the shade of the orange trees. All was still, with the afternoon stillness of Teneriffe, which will not wake up till sunset. Even the black goats had ceased to bleat and ring their bells. The hoopoe which had been saying Cuk--Cuk--Cuk all the morning in the pepper tree was silent. The light air from the sea, bringing with it a whiff as from a bride's bouquet, hardly stirred the leaves. The sunlight trembled on the yellow stone steps, and on the trailing, climbing bougainvillea which had flung its mantle of purple over the balustrade. Through an opening in a network of almond blossom Annette could look down across the white water-courses and green terraces to the little town of Santa Cruz, lying glittering in the sunshine, with its yellow and white and mauve walls and flat roofs and quaint cupolas, outlined as if cut out in white paper, sharp white against the vivid blue of the sea.
A grey lizard came slowly out of a clump of pink verbena near the tank, and spread itself in a patch of sunlight on a little round stone. Annette, as she lay motionless with thin folded hands, could see the pulse in its throat rise and fall as it turned its jewelled eyes now to this side, now to that, considering her as gravely as she was considering it.
A footfall came upon the stone steps. The lizard did not move. It was gone.
Mrs. Stoddart, an erect lilac figure under a white umbrella, came down the steps, with a cup of milk in her hand. Her forcible, incongruous countenance, with its peaked, indomitable nose and small, steady, tawny eyes under tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of having been knocked to pieces at some remote period and carelessly put together again. No feature seemed to fit with any other. If her face had not been held together by a certain shrewd benevolence which was spread all over it, she would have been a singularly forbidding-looking woman.
Annette took the cup and began dutifully to sip it, while Mrs. Stoddart sat down near her.
"Do you see the big gold-fish?" Annette said.
Her companion put up her pince-nez and watched him for a moment, swimming lazily near the surface.
"He seems much as usual," she said.
"It is not my fault if he is. I threw a tiny bit of stick at him a few minutes ago, and he bolted it at once; and then, just when I was beginning to feel anxious, he spat it out again to quite a considerable distance. He must have a very strong pop-gun in his