Her moving outlines dissolved into a misty coloured shimmer of a woman made of flame and shadows, crossing the threshold of his house.
The days which followed were not exactly such as Renouard had feared--yet they were not better than his fears.

They were accursed in all the moods they brought him.

But the general aspect of things was quiet.

The professor smoked innumerable pipes with the air of a worker on his holiday, always in movement and looking at things with that mysteriously sagacious aspect of men who are admittedly wiser than the rest of the world.

His white head of hair--whiter than anything within the horizon except the broken water on the reefs--was glimpsed in every part of the plantation always on the move under the white parasol.