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telephoned her financial adviser.
    â€œMadame Souabe, what a marvelous surprise!” cried Maître Queuille when they met at the hotel for an aperitif and dinner together. “You haven’t changed at all, how wonderful!”
    â€œNor have you, Roland,” replied Aimée.
    They talked business. They examined operating accounts and extracts from the land registry. Aimée gave the accountant sixty thousand francs that she had brought with her.
    â€œAlways cash! Highly suspect, I must say,” joked Maître Queuille without malice.
    He wrote out a receipt. He remarked that his sister had spent the month of September in England with her husband. The couple had not, however, been lucky enough to see Aimée on British television. The adviser asked Aimée, whom he continued to address as Madame Souabe, whether she had any thoughts of returning to France and finding work here. Aimée answered that she had grown accustomed to living and working in England.
    â€œWell, of course,” said Maître Queuille. He only half believed that this young woman was an actress in Great Britain, as she claimed, and he was even less convinced that she appeared in television commercials. Maître Queuille had a lively, prurient imagination. He rather suspected that his client was in fact a call girl.
    A while later Aimée and the adviser exchanged smiles and parted company. Aimée ran a few errands, then boarded a Chausson country bus. During the eighteen-kilometer ride, she browsed through a local newspaper. For quite some time now she had stopped buying the Paris papers. But in this local sheet she suddenly came upon the information she had searched for in vain in the national press two or three weeks earlier. DEADLY HUNTING read the headline of a short piece on a bloody accident in which the father of a family was killed and his two sons wounded. This , concluded the article, brings to a total of six the number of victims of hunting accidents since the beginning of the month. On the 2nd, M. Morin and M. Cardan shot each other in the vicinity of Saint-Bonnet-Tronçais (Allier). Two days later came the sad news from eastern France that M. François Roucart, a stock breeder, had been killed by a hunter not only inept but as yet unidentified. Are we heading for a time when hunting is more lethal to humans than to game? It is a fair question.
    Aimée kept the paper when she got off the coach in a village of two or three hundred souls. She walked through the village and started up a rock-strewn path angling up a hillside. The sky was gray and stormy. Aimée covered some four or five hundred meters. She kept wrenching her ankles on the rocks. She was sweating, even though the temperature was no more than eight or nine degrees above freezing and she was hardly well bundled up.
    She entered a hamlet at the edge of a wood of oak and beech. Pushing open a small metal door she came into the sandy courtyard of a stone house. Lichen and moss covered the walls. The doorway to the house was open. Aimée stood on the threshold and looked around the main room with its dark-purple tiled floor. In the half darkness she could make out a stove, a heavy table covered with an oilcloth, and a large bed piled high with eiderdowns and adorned with shiny copper fittings. A plate, a glass, silverware, and a saucepan were drying by the sink on a draining board of blackish stone.
    Aimée turned around. From the doorway she looked down over the vegetable garden that sloped away from the house beyond the sandy courtyard. Down in the valley the village could be seen beneath the gray sky, and fat white cows grazed in garishly green fields. Truck farms bordered a river. In the middle of the vegetable garden sat a woman in a straw hat, her back to the house. Aimée went down the three front steps and approached her.
    â€œMama?”
    The woman did not react. Aimée went around the chair and stood in front of her. The mother