thrown to the four winds. And when his
thoughts reverted to Clotilde, he told himself that everything would be
satisfactorily arranged, that he had only to call her back--she would be
here, she would close his eyes, she would defend his memory. And he sat
down to write at once to her, so that the letter might go by the morning
mail.

But when Pascal was seated before the white paper, with the pen between
his fingers, a growing doubt, a feeling of dissatisfaction with himself,
took possession of him. Was not this idea of his papers, this fine
project of providing a guardian for them and saving them, a suggestion
of his weakness, an excuse which he gave himself to bring back Clotilde,
and see her again? Selfishness was at the bottom of it. He was thinking
of himself, not of her. He saw her returning to this poor house,
condemned to nurse a sick old man; and he saw her, above all, in her
grief, in her awful agony, when he should terrify her some day by
dropping down dead at her side. No, no! this was the dreadful moment
which he must spare her, those days of cruel adieus and want afterward,
a sad legacy which he could not leave her without thinking himself a
criminal. Her tranquillity, her happiness only, were of any consequence,
the rest did not matter. He would die in his hole, then, abandoned,
happy to think her happy, to spare her the cruel blow of his death. As
for saving his manuscripts he would perhaps find a means of doing so,
he would try to have the strength to part from them and give them to
Ramond. But even if all his papers were to perish, this was less of a
sacrifice than to resign himself not to see her again, and he accepted
it, and he was willing that nothing of him should survive, not even his
thoughts, provided only that nothing of him should henceforth trouble
her dear existence.

Pascal accordingly proceeded to write one of his usual answers,
which, by a great effort, he purposely made colorless and almost cold.
Clotilde, in her last letter, without complaining of Maxime, had given
it to be understood that her brother had lost his interest in her,
preferring the society of Rose, the niece of Saccard's hairdresser, the
fair-haired young girl with the innocent look. And he suspected strongly
some maneuver of the father: a cunning plan to obtain possession of the
inheritance of the sick man, whose vices, so precocious formerly, gained
new force as his last hour approached. But in spite of his uneasiness