id not count on you, dear good doctor, I should have
turned shoeblack by this time."

Pierre felt a pang, and made up his mind to deal the blow at once,
since it must be done.

"I--oh, I cannot be of any use to you. I am leaving Havre early next
month."

Marowsko took off his spectacles, so great was his agitation.

"You! You! What are you saying?"

"I say that I am going away, my poor friend."

The old man was stricken, feeling his last hope slipping from under
him, and he suddenly turned against this man, whom he had followed,
whom he loved, whom he had so implicitly trusted, and who forsook him
thus.

He stammered out:

"You are surely not going to play me false--you?"

Pierre was so deeply touched that he felt inclined to embrace the old
fellow.

"I am not playing you false. I have not found anything to do here, and
I am going as medical officer on board a transatlantic passenger
boat."

"O Monsieur Pierre! And you always promised you would help me to make
a living!"

"What can I do? I must make my own living. I have not a farthing in
the world."

Marowsko said: "It is wrong; what you are doing is very wrong. There
is nothing for me but to die of hunger. At my age this is the end of
all things. It is wrong. You are forsaking a poor old man who came
here to be with you. It is wrong."

Pierre tried to explain, to protest, to give reasons, to prove that he
could not have done otherwise; the Pole, enraged by his desertion,
would not listen to him, and he ended by saying, with an allusion no
doubt to political events:

"You French--you never keep your word!"

At this Pierre rose, offended on his part, and taking rather a high
tone he said:

"You are unjust, pere Marowsko; a man must have very strong motives to
act as I have done, and you ought to understand that. Au revoir--I
hope I may find you more reasonable." And he went away.

"Well, well," he thought, "not a soul will feel a sincere regret for
me."

His mind sought through all the people he knew or had known, and among
the faces which crossed his memory he saw that of the girl at the
tavern who led him to doubt his mother.

He hesitated, having still an instinctive grudge against her, then
suddenly reflected on the other hand: "After all, she was right." And
he looked about him to find the turning.

The beer-shop, as it happened, was full of people, and also full of
smoke. The customers, tradesmen, and laborers, for it was a holiday,