y and fat, its bare body flushed by the warm
sunshine, while it strives to stammer words which its mother arrests
with kisses! And Helene thought of all this without any anger; her
heart was mute, yet seemingly derived yet greater quietude from the
sadness of her spirit. The land of the sun had vanished from her
vision; her eyes wandered slowly over Paris, on whose huge frame
winter had laid his freezing hand. Above the Pantheon another patch of
blue was now spreading in the heavens.

Meanwhile memory was recalling the past to life. At Marseilles she had
spent her days in a state of coma. One morning as she went along the
Rue des Petites-Maries, she had burst out sobbing in front of the home
of her childhood. That was the last occasion on which she had wept.
Monsieur Rambaud was her frequent visitor; she felt his presence near
her to be a protection. Towards autumn she had one evening seen him
enter, with red eyes and in the agony of a great sorrow; his brother,
Abbe Jouve, was dead. In her turn she comforted him. What followed she
could not recall with any exactitude of detail. The Abbe ever seemed
to stand behind them, and influenced by thought of him she succumbed
resignedly. When M. Rambaud once more hinted at his wish, she had
nothing to say in refusal. It seemed to her that what he asked was but
sensible. Of her own accord, as her period of mourning was drawing to
an end, she calmly arranged all the details with him. His hands
trembled in a transport of tenderness. It should be as she pleased; he
had waited for months; a sign sufficed him. They were married in
mourning garb. On the wedding night he, like her first husband, kissed
her bare feet--feet fair as though fashioned out of marble. And thus
life began once more.

While the belt of blue was broadening on the horizon, this awakening
of memory came with an astounding effect on Helene. Had she lived
through a year of madness, then? To-day, as she pictured the woman who
had lived for nearly three years in that room in the Rue Vineuse, she
imagined that she was passing judgment on some stranger, whose conduct
revolted and surprised her. How fearfully foolish had been her act!
how abominably wicked! Yet she had not sought it. She had been living
peacefully, hidden in her nook, absorbed in the love of her daughter.
Untroubled by any curious thoughts, by any desire, she had seen the
road of life lying before her. But a breath had swept by, and she had
fallen. Even