threw upon her
child! She had never looked at him in that way before. Jack did
not venture to speak again, and the evening to him was but a dreary
continuation of the repast.

Ida and the poet talked in low voices, and in that confidential tone
that indicates great intimacy. He told her of his sad childhood and of
his early home. He described the ruined towers and the long corridors
where the wind raged and howled. He then depicted his early struggles
in the great city, the constant obstacles thrown in the way of the
development of his genius, of his jealous rivals and literary enemies,
and of the terrible epigrams which he had hurled upon them.

"Then I uttered these stinging words." This time she did not interrupt
him, but listened with a smile, and her absorption was so great that
when he ceased speaking she still listened, although nothing was to be
heard in the salon save the ticking of the clock and the rustling of the
leaves of the album that Jack, half asleep, was turning over. Suddenly
she rose with a start.

"Come, Jack, my love; call Constant to take you back to school. It is
quite time."

"O, mamma!" said the child, sadly; but he dared not say that he
generally remained much later. He did not wish to be troublesome to his
mother, nor to meet again such an expression in her ordinarily serene
and laughing eyes, as had so startled him at the dinner-table.

She rewarded him for his self-control by a most loving embrace.

"Good night, my child!" said D'Argenton, and he drew the child toward
him as if to embrace him, but suddenly, with a movement of repulsion,
turned aside as he had done at dinner from the fruit.

"I cannot! I cannot!" he murmured, throwing himself back in his
arm-chair and passing his handkerchief over his forehead.

Jack turned to his mother in amazement.

"Go, dear Jack. Take him away, Constant." And while Madame de Barancy
sought to conciliate her poet, the child returned with a heavy heart to
his school; and in the cold dormitory, as he thought of the professor
installed in his mother's chimney-corner, said to himself, "He is very
comfortable there. I wonder how long he means to stay!"

In D'Argenton's exclamation and in his repugnance to Jack, there was
certainly some acting, but there was also real feeling. He was very
jealous of the child, who represented to him Ida's past, not that the
poet was profoundly in love with the countess. He, on the contrary,
loved himself in her, an