"If not for you," the woman said, "Alain would still be alive."

An electric silence gripped the room. Mathilde jerked sharply and gasped.

Claude stared at Sophie, paralyzed with rage or shock; it was impossible to say which.

Sophie began to speak again, then closed her mouth as her eyes filmed over with tears. "Oh, the hell with it," she said in English, and then turned away from him and strode out of the room.

Her two companions, still seated, looked uncomfortably at each other. After a moment, the older man stood up, grayhaired, and rawboned like his wife, and went quietly out after her. The younger man continued to sit, embarrassed by the intensity of a scene he had imperfectly comprehended. Then he too stood up, and the eyes of the others swung to him. Uneasy at being the sudden focus of attention, he cleared his throat softly, nodded to the room at large, and self-consciously followed the other man out, his eyes on the floor.

Once he’d pulled the heavy door shut behind him to stand outside in the graveled courtyard, he released the breath that had stopped up his chest. His bland, freckled, good-natured face was set, his pale-blue eyes tense.

What had he gotten himself into? Why wasn’t he back in his cozy, cluttered office at Northern California State University getting ready for his spring-quarter seminar on comic dramatists of the Restoration? There was plenty of prep time needed, God knows, and when was he going to find it?

Although the March air was chilly, he patted beads of perspiration from his forehead with a clean, folded handkerchief. Emotional explosions and disorder were as unsuited to the nature of Raymond Alphonse Schaefer as-well, as propriety and order were to the early comedies of Congreve. He smiled at the thought, feeling a little better. Perhaps he could work it into the seminar. Omitting the personal reference, of course.