inking of the man he had hitherto
believed to be his father; and possibly the vague notion he had long
since conceived, of that father's inferiority, with his brother's
constant irony, the scornful indifference of others, and the very
maid-servant's contempt for Roland, had somewhat prepared his mind for
his mother's terrible avowal. It had all made it less dreadful to him
to find that he was another man's son; and if, after the great shock
and agitation of the previous evening, he had not suffered the
reaction of rage, indignation, and rebellion which Mme. Roland had
feared, it was because he had long been unconsciously chafing under
the sense of being the child of this well-meaning lout.

They had now reached the dwelling of Mme. Rosemilly.

She lived on the road to Sainte-Adresse, on the second floor of a
large tenement which she owned. The windows commanded a view of the
whole roadstead.

On seeing Mme. Roland, who entered first, instead of merely holding
out her hands as usual, she put her arms round her and kissed her, for
she divined the purpose of her visit.

The furniture of this drawing-room, all in stamped velvet, was always
shrouded in chair-covers. The walls, hung with flowered paper, were
graced by four engravings, the purchase of her late husband, the
captain. They represented sentimental scenes of seafaring life. In the
first, a fisherman's wife was seen, waving a handkerchief on shore,
while the vessel which bore away her husband vanished on the horizon.
In the second, the same woman on her knees on the same shore, under a
sky shot with lightning, wrung her arms as she gazed into the distance
at her husband's boat, which was going to the bottom amid impossible
waves.

The others represented similar scenes in a higher rank of society. A
young lady with fair hair, resting her elbows on the edge of a large
steamship quitting the shore, gazed at the already distant coast with
eyes full of tears and regret. Whom is she leaving behind?

Then the same young lady sitting by an open window with a view of the
sea, had fainted in an armchair; a letter she had dropped lay at her
feet. So he is dead! What despair!

Visitors were generally much moved and charmed by the commonplace
pathos of these obvious and sentimental works. They were at once
intelligible without question or explanation, and the poor women were
to be pitied, though the nature of the grief of the more elegant of
the two was not precisely kn