her! Oh, if he could but have
taken her in his arms at that moment, how he would have kissed and
caressed her, and gone on his knees to crave pardon.

Would she have deceived his father--she?

His father!--A very worthy man no doubt, upright and honest in
business, but with a mind which had never gone beyond the horizon of
his shop. How was it that this woman, who must have been very
pretty--as he knew, and it could still be seen--gifted, too, with a
delicate, tender, emotional soul, have accepted a man so unlike
herself as a suitor and a husband? Why inquire? She had married, as
young French girls do marry, the youth with a little fortune proposed
to her by their relations. They had settled at once in their shop in
the Rue Montmartre; and the young wife, ruling over the desk, inspired
by the feeling of a new home, and the subtle and sacred sense of
interests in common which fills the place of love, and even of regard,
by the domestic hearth of most of the commercial houses of Paris, had
set to work with all her superior and active intelligence, to make the
fortune they hoped for. And so her life had flowed on, uniform,
peaceful and respectable, but loveless.

Loveless?--was it possible then that a woman should not love? That a
young and pretty woman, living in Paris, reading books, applauding
actresses for dying of passion on the stage, could live from youth to
old age, without once feeling her heart touched? He would not believe
it of any one else; why should she be different from all others,
though she was his mother?

She had been young, with all the poetic weaknesses which agitate the
heart of a young creature. Shut up, imprisoned in the shop, by the
side of a vulgar husband who always talked of trade, she had dreamed
of moonlight nights, of voyages, of kisses exchanged in the shades of
evening. And then, one day a man had come in, as lovers do in books,
and had talked as they talk.

She had loved him. Why not? She was his mother. What then? Must a man
be blind and stupid to the point of rejecting evidence because it
concerns his mother? And she had been frail. Why, yes, since this man
had had no other love, since he had remained faithful to her when she
was far away and growing old. Why yes, since he had left all his
fortune to his son--their son!

And Pierre started to his feet, quivering with such rage that he
longed to kill some one. With his arm outstretched, his hand wide
open, he wanted to hit, to b