otherly face. He
could no longer recall all the nice, tender things, so sweet, so bitter,
that had come to his mind that morning when he thought of the other, of
little Lise, of the dainty Ashflower. What, then, had become of her, the
former one, the one he had loved? That woman of far-off dreams, the
blonde with gray eyes, the young girl who used to call him "Jaquelet" so
prettily?

They remained side by side, motionless, both constrained, troubled,
profoundly ill at ease.

As they talked only commonplaces, awkwardly and spasmodically and slowly,
she rose and pressed the button of the bell.

"I am going to call Renee," she said.

There was a tap at the door, then the rustle of a dress; then a young
voice exclaimed:

"Here I am, mamma!"

Lormerin remained bewildered as at the sight of an apparition.

He stammered:

"Good-day, mademoiselle"

Then, turning toward the mother:

"Oh! it is you!"

In fact, it was she, she whom he had known in bygone days, the Lise who
had vanished and come back! In her he found the woman he had won
twenty-five years before. This one was even younger, fresher, more
childlike.

He felt a wild desire to open his arms, to clasp her to his heart again,
murmuring in her ear:

"Good-morning, Lison!"

A man-servant announced:

"Dinner is ready, madame."

And they proceeded toward the dining-room.

What passed at this dinner? What did they say to him, and what could he
say in reply? He found himself plunged in one of those strange dreams
which border on insanity. He gazed at the two women with a fixed idea in
his mind, a morbid, self-contradictory idea:

"Which is the real one?"

The mother smiled again repeating over and over:

"Do you remember?" And it was in the bright eyes of the young girl that
he found again his memories of the past. Twenty times he opened his mouth
to say to her: "Do you remember, Lison?" forgetting this white-haired
lady who was looking at him tenderly.

And yet, there were moments when, he no longer felt sure, when he lost
his head. He could see that the woman of to-day was not exactly the woman
of long ago. The other one, the former one, had in her voice, in her
glances, in her entire being, something which he did not find again. And
he made prodigious efforts of mind to recall his lady love, to seize
again what had escaped from her, what this resuscitated one did not
possess.

The baronne said:

"You have lost your old vivacity, my poor fri