Franz von Klausen she knew that she did love and would always love. She was married to Jim, and Franz himself said that marriage was a sacrament. Where, then, was the occult power of the sacrament that it could not hold her heart? She could not, in honesty, live with Jim as his wife; according to von Klausen's standard, she could not in moral rectitude live with von Klausen. What was left for her but to run away?
Thus it was that she arrived at her decision. In her primal impulses she was still only a young animal that had been caught in the marriage trap, that had torn herself free, and that now, wounded and bleeding, wanted to hide and suffer alone.
She had some money in her purse--a thousand francs. She wrote the note to Jim, who she felt certain would supply her with any more money that she might require, gave it to the maid, left the house on her tiptoes and, after a few hesitant enquiries of a lonely policeman, took the tram to Aubagne. In Aubagne she hired a carriage for the Ste. Baume.
It was a marvellous drive under a sky of brilliant blue. Leaving behind a fruitful valley dotted with prettily gardened, badly designed villas, they climbed for four hours, into a tremendous sweep of rugged mountains. Upward, until the vegetation lost its luxuriance and became sparse, the carriage curved around and around peak set upon peak, only thirty miles from the sea, yet nine hundred metres above it. Sometimes, looking over the side, she could count five loops of the road beneath her and as many more above, glistening yellow and deserted among the gaunt outlines of rock. Not a house, not another wayfarer was in view, only the billowing mountains that rose out of wild timberlands below to gigantic cliffs bare of any growth, perpendicular combs, sheer precipices miles long and nearly a thousand feet in height, which seemed to bend and sway along the sky-edge. With a sudden curve that showed even Marseilles and the ocean shimmering against the horizon, they rounded the last height, descended but a few hundred feet upon a wide plateau, the sides of which were partially wooded chasms, and came, among a dozen scattered houses, to the Hôtellerie that had for many years been a Dominican monastery and still maintained the simplicity of its builders.