For Balint and Adrienne it was like an earthquake or typhoon, a destroying power which no words could express, sublime and irresistible, annihilating everything in the world but their need for each other. The only words they could find were each other’s names, endlessly repeated and half swallowed by the eagerness and desperation of their kisses as they pulled themselves to the ground and sank tightly entwined into the deep carpet of moss and leaves, abandoning themselves to their mutual passion …

In the twilight sky above a few bats flew ever upwards barely visible between the forest and the deep violet of the heavens.

At length Adrienne sat up and raised her hands to tidy her tousled hair.

Balint looked up at her, hesitant and worried. After the joy and daze of their unexpected meeting had subsided he was suddenly assailed by terrible misgivings, remembering Addy’s baleful words in Venice nearly a year before when they had parted at dawn and when she had said, ‘I will try to go on living … provided we never meet again.’

That had been their agreement, and he had accepted it to save her from the despairing self-inflicted death she had determined upon if ever their love were consummated and to which he had again agreed after they had become lovers and then been forced to part. The threat of death had long been with them, not only her own freely chosen suicide but also from outside, from Adrienne’s husband, Pal Uzdy, the mad son of a mad father, who, burdened by his own baleful heredity, always carried a loaded revolver and delighted in the fear he inspired. During Balint’s long pursuit of Adrienne he had paid little heed to the menace of Pal Uzdy’s unstable temperament, but it had haunted them both when, a year before, Adrienne had travelled to Venice with her sisters.

It was then that, at long last, Adrienne had summoned Balint to join her. It was just to be for four weeks, no more, just four weeks of joy and the fulfilment of their dreams, four weeks of paradise for which she had decreed she would pay with her life. At the time it had not seemed too high a price to pay.

On their first night together they had been on the point of drawing back but, overcome by their love, they had been carried away until no withdrawal was possible. At the end of their brief month it was only fear for what might happen to Balint that made Adrienne’s determination falter.

Long before they finally had come together they had been haunted by the Angel of Death when Adrienne, at last conscious of her love for Balint, had written to him imploring him to go away rather than make her surrender to his passion, saying, ‘… if that would happen I would kill myself … I am his wife, his chattel. How could I live … if with him and with you too? I would rather die. There is no other way!’

What happened later, until their sad parting in Venice, was now only a memory, but the words of Adrienne’s letter had remained with him as an ever-present threat. What would now happen? What could now happen? To part again was to him unthinkable, nothing would make him leave her again; but his heart missed a beat at the thought that this unplanned meeting might not have released Adrienne from her promise and that, as before, she would never accept a double existence with her husband and with him.

From where he lay he could not properly see her face. He sat up, his hand on Adrienne’s knee. He said only one word, but in it was framed the only question to which he needed an answer. ‘Addy?’ he said.

She looked at him smiling faintly with her mouth and more frankly with her eyes. She gave him her hand, her long supple fingers gently caressing his own.

‘I don’t mind anything any more … not now,’ she said slowly.

Adrienne had also been thinking back to their parting in Venice and to what she had then said.

When, after Balint had left her and she had stood at the window gazing sightlessly over the great lagoon, she had felt that she had already died, that her life was over, and that in promising her lover that she would not now take her own life she had merely done so to comfort him. In reality she had decided that she would do nothing for some weeks, or even months, so that no one would make any connection between her death and the man in whose arms she, for the first and only time in her life, had been made happy.

Afterwards she had not changed her intention.

When her husband arrived in Venice she had greeted him with as much interest as if she were walking in her sleep. She had been kept busy with arranging the details of their return and above all with caring for her sick younger sister, Judith.

It was concern for Judith which had kept Adrienne sane in the first days after Balint had gone away. Poor Judith! What a sad fate hers had been! The trip to Venice had been arranged by the family to give the girl a change of air and to take her far away from the place where she had been shocked into mental withdrawal when her lover was proved a villain and ran away without giving her a thought. Maybe, the family had hoped, the change would help bring her to her senses.

As it had turned out Judith had already been nearer to a complete breakdown than anyone had realized; and the final blow that thrust her over the edge had come in Venice, at the Lido, when her own love-letters were sent back to her by an unknown woman in whose house Judith’s lover had left them. Until then Judith had not realized the full extent of the betrayal, thinking her lover as much sinned against as sinning, and the shock of this new knowledge had completely unhinged her.