as impossible to forestall or to stop her, and ran off to lock
herself into her room.

Roland and the doctor were left face to face.

"Can you make head or tail of it?" said the father.

"Oh, yes," said the other. "It is a little nervous disturbance, not
alarming or surprising; such attacks may very likely recur from time
to time."

They did in fact recur, almost every day; and Pierre seemed to bring
them on with a word, as if he had the clue to her strange and new
disorder. He would discern in her face a lucid interval of peace and
with the willingness of a torturer would, with a word, revive the
anguish that had been lulled for a moment.

But he, too, was suffering, as cruelly as she. It was dreadful pain to
him that he could no longer love her nor respect her, that he must put
her on the rack. When he had laid bare the bleeding wound which he had
opened in her woman's, her mother's heart, when he felt how wretched
and desperate she was, he would go out alone, wander about the town,
so torn by remorse, so broken by pity, so grieved to have thus
hammered her with his scorn as her son, that he longed to fling
himself into the sea and put an end to it all by drowning himself.

Ah! How gladly, now, would he have forgiven her. But he could not, for
he was incapable of forgetting. If only he could have desisted from
making her suffer; but this again he could not, suffering as he did
himself. He went home to his meals, full of relenting resolutions;
then, as soon as he saw her, as soon as he met her eye--formerly so
clear and frank, now so evasive, frightened, and bewildered--he struck
at her in spite of himself, unable to suppress the treacherous words
which would rise to his lips.

The disgraceful secret, known to them alone, goaded him up against
her. It was as a poison flowing in his veins and giving him an impulse
to bite like a mad dog.

And there was no one in the way now to hinder his reading her; Jean
lived almost entirely in his new apartments, and only came home to
dinner and to sleep every night at his father's.

He frequently observed his brother's bitterness and violence, and
attributed them to jealousy. He promised himself that some day he
would teach him his place and give him a lesson, for life at home was
becoming very painful as a result of these constant scenes. But as he
now lived apart he suffered less from this brutal conduct, and his
love of peace prompted him to patience. His good fortune,