The passengers were already going on board the Trouville boat; Pierre
took a seat aft on a wooden bench.

He asked himself:

"Now was she uneasy at my asking for the portrait or only surprised? Has
she mislaid it, or has she hidden it? Does she know where it is, or does
she not? If she had hidden it--why?"

And his mind, still following up the same line of thought from one
deduction to another, came to this conclusion:

That portrait--of a friend, of a lover, had remained in the drawing-room
in a conspicuous place, till one day when the wife and mother perceived,
first of all and before any one else, that it bore a likeness to her
son. Without doubt she had for a long time been on the watch for this
resemblance; then, having detected it, having noticed its beginnings,
and understanding that any one might, any day, observe it too, she had
one evening removed the perilous little picture and had hidden it, not
daring to destroy it.

Pierre recollected quite clearly now that it was long, long before
they left Paris that the miniature had vanished. It had disappeared, he
thought, about the time that Jean's beard was beginning to grow, which
had made him suddenly and wonderfully like the fair young man who smiled
from the picture-frame.

The motion of the boat as it put off disturbed and dissipated his
meditations. He stood up and looked at the sea. The little steamer,
once outside the piers, turned to the left, and puffing and snorting and
quivering, made for a distant point visible through the morning haze.
The red sail of a heavy fishing-bark, lying motionless on the level
waters, looked like a large rock standing up out of the sea. And
the Seine, rolling down from Rouen, seemed a wide inlet dividing two
neighbouring lands. They reached the harbour of Trouville in less than
an hour, and as it was the time of day when the world was bathing,
Pierre went to the shore.

From a distance it looked like a garden full of gaudy flowers. All along
the stretch of yellow sand, from the pier as far as the Roches Noires,
sun-shades of every hue, hats of every shape, dresses of every colour,
in groups outside the bathing huts, in long rows by the margin of the
waves, or scattered here and there, really looked like immense bouquets
on a vast meadow. And the Babel of sounds--voices near and far ringing
thin in the light atmosphere, shouts and cries of children being bathed,
clear laughter of women--all made a pleasant, continuo