II + 

The doctor was silent for a second, and then resumed: + 

“One day, while I was receiving patients in my office, a tall young man entered. He said to me: + 

“ ‘Doctor, I have come to ask you news of the Comtesse Marie Baranow. I am a friend of her husband, although she does not know me.’ + 

“I answered: + 

“ ‘She is lost. She will never return to Russia.’ + 

“And suddenly this man began to sob, then he rose and went out, staggering like a drunken man. + 

“I told the Comtesse that evening that a stranger had come to make inquiries about her health. She seemed moved, and told me the story which I have just related to you. She added: + 

“ ‘That man, whom I do not know at all, follows me now like my shadow. I meet him every time I go out. He looks at me in a strange way, but he has never spoken to me!’ + 

“She pondered a moment, then added: + 

“ ‘Come, I’ll wager that he is under the window now.’ + 

“She left her reclining-chair, went to the window and drew back the curtain, and actually showed me the man who had come to see me, seated on a bench at the edge of the side wall with his eyes raised toward the house. He perceived us, rose, and went away without once turning around. + 

“Then I understood a sad and surprising thing, the silent love of these two beings, who were not acquainted with each other. + 

“He loved her with the devotion of a rescued animal, grateful and devoted to the death. He came every day to ask me, ‘How is she?’ understanding that I had guessed his feelings. And he wept frightfully when he saw her pass, weaker and paler every day. + 

“She said to me: + 

“ ‘I have never spoken but once to that singular man, and yet it seems as if I had known him for twenty years.’ + 

“And when they met she returned his bow with a serious and charming smile. I felt that⁠—although she was given up, and knew herself lost⁠—she was happy to be loved thus, with this respect and constancy, with this exaggerated poetry, with this devotion, ready for anything. + 

“Nevertheless, faithful to her superexcited obstinacy, she absolutely refused to learn his name, to speak to him. She said: + 

“ ‘No, no, that would spoil this strange friendship. We must remain strangers to each other.’ + 

“As for him, he was certainly a kind of Don Quixote, for he did nothing to bring himself closer to her. He intended to keep to the end the absurd promise never to speak to her which he had made in the railway carriage. + 

“Often, during her long hours of weakness, she rose from her reclining-chair and partly opened the curtain to see whether he were there, beneath the window. When she had seen him, always motionless upon his bench, she went back and lay down with a smile upon her lips. + 

“She died one day about ten o’clock. As I was leaving the hotel he came up to me with a distracted face; he had already heard the news. + 

“ ‘I should like to see her, for one second, in your presence,’ said he. + 

“I took him by the arm and went back into the house. + 

“When he was beside the couch of the dead woman he seized her hand and kissed it long and tenderly and then fled away like a madman.” + 

The doctor again was silent, then continued: + 

“This is certainly the strangest railway adventure that I know. It must also be said that men sometimes do the maddest things.” + 

A woman murmured, half aloud: + 

“Those two people were not so crazy as you think. They were⁠—they were⁠—” + 

But she could not continue, she was crying so. As we changed the conversation to calm her, we never knew what she had wished to say. + 