weep again"...

Her hand rose to her breast as if to shield it from a cruel blow, and it seemed to me that she would throw her head on my shoulder and weep, for her eyes were like the eyes of a tortured, wounded creature, fettered by pain. Her face showed bare of its mask, humbled in its look, innocent and pure like her face as she wept by the rose tree years before... Her face spoke to me in silence of what her heart concealed, and my heart danced to see her before me a second time — little, beloved Nana, despite her dress and her paints and her veil... I drew near her, gripping that fleeting moment with a hand of iron for fear it would slip away and retreat once more behind the mask, and I said breathlessly:

"Come — let us go to the garden and take up our broken-off talks"...

She stretched out her hand to me, then stood in her place and was silent, not uttering a letter...

"Nana, where are you? Come, let's dance."

She turned toward the caller, then turned her face to me once more — turned it masked, beautiful, smiling, aloof — and said:

"I am sorry, I cannot leave my friends. We shall talk another time; please excuse me now." Then she walked away from me, into the arms of the noise and the music...

I felt for the bracelet crouching in my pocket, the bracelet that should have been around her wrist and not in its blue velvet box; then I went out like a man stunned, without another glance at her — out into the darkness, far from those lights and glasses and bare throats, into the belly of the night, where the merciful blackness would hide my disappointment and my daze...

•

The days passed after that, their hours pricking me like needles. I thought of visiting her by day, to see whether the sun of daytime would be kinder to her than the candles of night; but a strange feeling shackled my feet and I could not stir... I was afraid that the eyes of the new "Nana" would kill the love my heart carried for the old Nana, and that it would be wounded by this strange creature who wore masks and bore paints...

I plunged my thoughts into my work and spent my time bent over my papers in my new office, forgetting my confusion and my heaviness of heart, fleeing the sight of her despite my deep, sweeping longing...

I had made no reckoning with chance when one day I found myself standing face to face with her at a row of books in one of the bookshops. Her thick hair was tied with a red ribbon and drawn back like the hair of a child of no more than nine; in her loose striped dress