uggestively.

"I saw you with two girls last night; the company did you honor; it was
one of them, perhaps."

"You guess shrewdly," he replied.

"This is her room now; it may be she will object to see me here."

"You are right," said Ralph Flare, with mock courtesy, rising up. "When
you lived with me I permitted no one to visit me in your absence. My
late friends will be vexed. You have finished the business which brought
you here, and I must go to breakfast now."

Ralph was a good actor. Had he thought Suzette really meant to go, he
would have fallen on his knees.

"Stop, Ralph, my boy," she cried. "I know that you do not love me; I
can't see why I ever believed that you did. But let me sit with you a
little while. You drove me from you once. I know that you have found
one to fill my place; but, _enfant_, I love you. I want to take your
head in my arms as I have done a hundred times, and hear you say one
kind word before we part forever."

"There was a time," he said slowly, "when you did not need my embraces.
I was eager to give them. I did not give you kindness only; I gave you
nourishment, shelter, clothing, money. You were unworthy and ungrateful.
You are nothing to me now. Do not think to wheedle me back to be your
fool again."

"Oh! for charity, my child, not for love--I am too wretched to hope
that--for pity, let me sit by your side five minutes. I cannot put it
into words why I beg it, but it is a little thing to grant. If one
starved you, or had stolen from you, and asked it so earnestly, you
would consent. I only want you to think less bitterly of me. You must
needs have some hard thoughts. I have done wrong, my boy, but you do not
know all the cause, and as what I mean to say cannot make place in your
breast for me now, you will know that it is true, because it has no
design. Oh! _Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!_ It is so hard to have but one deep
love, and yet find that love the greatest sorrow of one's life. It is so
hard to have loved my boy so well, and to know that to the end of his
days he hated me."

She said this with all the impetuosity of her race; with utter
abandonment of plan or effort, yet with a wild power of love and gesture
which we know only upon the stage, but which in France is life, feeling,
reality.

She sat down and sobbed, raising her voice till it rolled with a shrill
music which made him quiver, through the parted curtain and into the
turbulent street. There were troops passing ben