fied records of this family tree.
She could still hear certain of his words commenting on each hereditary
case, she recalled his lessons. But the children, above all, interested
her; she read again and again the notes on the leaves which bore their
names. The doctor's colleague in Noumea, to whom he had written for
information about the child born of the marriage of the convict Etienne,
had at last made up his mind to answer; but the only information he gave
was in regard to the sex--it was a girl, he said, and she seemed to be
healthy. Octave Mouret had come near losing his daughter, who had always
been very frail, while his little boy continued to enjoy superb health.
But the chosen abode of vigorous health and of extraordinary fecundity
was still the house of Jean, at Valqueyras, whose wife had had two
children in three years and was about to have a third. The nestlings
throve in the sunshine, in the heart of a fertile country, while the
father sang as he guided his plow, and the mother at home cleverly made
the soup and kept the children in order. There was enough new vitality
and industry there to make another family, a whole race. Clotilde
fancied at this moment that she could hear Pascal's cry: "Ah, our
family! what is it going to be, in what kind of being will it end?" And
she fell again into a reverie, looking at the tree sending its latest
branches into the future. Who could tell whence the healthy branch would
spring? Perhaps the great and good man so long awaited was germinating
there.

A slight cry drew Clotilde from her reflections. The muslin curtain of
the cradle seemed to become animate. It was the child who had wakened up
and was moving about and calling to her. She at once took him out of the
cradle and held him up gaily, that he might bathe in the golden light of
the setting sun. But he was insensible to the beauty of the closing day;
his little vacant eyes, still full of sleep, turned away from the vast
sky, while he opened wide his rosy and ever hungry mouth, like a bird
opening its beak. And he cried so loud, he had wakened up so ravenous,
that she decided to nurse him again. Besides, it was his hour; it would
soon be three hours since she had last nursed him.

Clotilde sat down again beside the table. She took him on her lap, but
he was not very good, crying louder and louder, growing more and more
impatient; and she looked at him with a smile while she unfastened her
dress, showing her round, s