It was clear that there was something more in his mind than mere anxiety about the date of his lectures for fashionable audiences.
What did the man mean by his confounded platitudes?
To Renouard, scared by Luiz in the morning (for he felt that nothing could be more fatal than to have his deception unveiled otherwise than by personal confession), this talk sounded like encouragement or a warning from that man who seemed to him to be very brazen and very subtle.

It was like being bullied by the dead and cajoled by the living into a throw of dice for a supreme stake.
Renouard went away to some distance from the house and threw himself down in the shade of a tree.

He lay there perfectly still with his forehead resting on his folded arms, light-headed and thinking.

It seemed to him that he must be on fire, then that he had fallen into a cool whirlpool, a smooth funnel of water swirling about with nauseating rapidity.

And then (it must have been a reminiscence of his boyhood) he was walking on the dangerous thin ice of a river, unable to turn back.