Chapter 9
Going back to the hotel, I had my first pang of regret for having waked up on that midnight at Bourg-la-Comtesse. It was the same reflection; the dead were so much wiser in staying dead. I guessed that during the weeks when I was missing Vio had mourned for me with a grief into which a new element had come when my clothes were found on the bank of the Padrille. That was a mistake, that my clothes should be found there. A missing man should be traced to a prison or a hospital, or remain gloriously missing. He should have no interval of safety in which to go in bathing, a hundred miles from the spot on which he had last been seen alive, not even to be drowned. There was a mystery in that which might easily become a flaw in a soldier's record, and which to a woman as proud as Vio would be equ
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