The narrator watches Faustine and Morel for 17 days and concludes that even if Morel was referring to Faustine in his speech—and he doesn’t believe that Morel was—Faustine does not return his love. The narrator notes all their little contacts, even when their legs touch under a table, which he calls an accident. He thinks that Morel would be angry with him for spreading word of his invention. He worries that Faustine would too, though if she had had a falling out with Morel, the narrator suspects she would be on his side. The fact the narrator never heard of the invention while living in Caracas suggests to him that Morel is dead. But then, he muses, one of the others on the island might have told people—unless they all died. The narrator revisits the fact that no one believed Morel, or they thought he was disconnected from reality, or that they were all hallucinating.

Escaping is still perilous, and the narrator feels that the images protect him from his pursuers as they would forget about him when they saw the others on the island. However, he thinks about finding Faustine out in the real world and how she would laugh when he told her how he spoke to her image.