at
first. But when the vehicle was well on its way, and he had behind
him the sad Calvary where his honour hung gibbeted, Jansoulet, utterly
overcome, laid his head on his mother's shoulder, hid it in the old
green shawl, and there, with the burning tears flowing, all his great
body shaken by sobs, he returned to the cry of his childhood: "Mother."

DRAMAS OF PARIS

Que l'heure est donc breve,
Qu'on passe en aimant!
C'est moins qu'un moment,
Un peu plus qu'un reve.

In the semi-obscurity of a great drawing-room filled with flowers, the
seats of the furniture covered with holland, the chandeliers draped with
muslin, the windows open, and the venetians lowered, Mme. Jenkins is
seated at the piano reading the new song of the fashionable musician;
some melodic phrases accompanying exquisite verse, a melancholy _Lied_,
unequally divided, which seems written for the tender gravities of her
voice and the disturbed state of her soul.

Le temps nous enleve
Notre enchantement

sighs the poor woman, moved by the sound of her own voice, and while
the notes float away in the court-yard of the house, where the fountain
falls drop by drop among a bed of rhododendrons, the singer breaks off,
her hands holding the chord, her eyes fixed on the music, but her look
far away. The doctor is absent. The care of his health and business has
exiled him from Paris for some days, and the thoughts of the beautiful
Mme. Jenkins have taken that grave turn, as often happens in solitude,
that analytical tendency which sometimes makes even momentary
separations fatal in the most united households. United they had not
been for sometime. They only saw each other at meal-times, before
the servants, hardly speaking unless he, the man of unctuous manners,
allowed himself to make some disobliging or brutal remark on her son,
or on her age, which she began to show, or on some dress which did not
become her. Always gentle and serene, she stifled her tears, accepted
everything, feigned not to understand; not that she loved him still
after so much cruelty and contempt, but it was the story, as their
coachman Joe told it, "of an old clinger who was determined to make him
marry her." Up to then a terrible obstacle--the life of the legitimate
wife--had prolonged a dishonourable situation. Now that the obstacle
no longer existed she wished to put an end to the situation, because
of Andre, who from one day to another might