-currant brandy. "You may do worse than live idle when you have
a snug little income. I hope Jean will have us to dinner in style now.
Hang it all! If I have indigestion now and then I cannot help it."

Then turning to his wife he added:

"Go and fetch that portrait, little woman, as you have done your dinner.
I should like to see it again myself."

She rose, took a taper, and went. Then, after an absence which Pierre
thought long, though she was not away more than three minutes, Mme.
Roland returned smiling, and holding an old-fashioned gilt frame by the
ring.

"Here it is," said she, "I found it at once."

The doctor was the first to put forth his hand; he took the picture,
and holding it a little away from him, he examined it. Then, fully aware
that his mother was looking at him, he slowly raised his eyes and fixed
them on his brother to compare the faces. He could hardly refrain, in
his violence, from saying: "Dear me! How like Jean!" And though he dared
not utter the terrible words, he betrayed his thought by his manner of
comparing the living face with the painted one.

They had, no doubt, details in common; the same beard, the same brow;
but nothing sufficiently marked to justify the assertion: "This is
the father and that the son." It was rather a family likeness, a
relationship of physiognomies in which the same blood courses. But what
to Pierre was far more decisive than the common aspect of the faces, was
that his mother had risen, had turned her back, and was pretending, too
deliberately, to be putting the sugar basin and the liqueur bottle
away in a cupboard. She understood that he knew, or at any rate had his
suspicions.

"Hand it on to me," said Roland.

Pierre held out the miniature and his father drew the candle towards him
to see it better; then, he murmured in a pathetic tone:

"Poor fellow! To think that he was like that when we first knew him!
Cristi! How time flies! He was a good-looking man, too, in those days,
and with such a pleasant manner--was not he, Louise?"

As his wife made no answer he went on:

"And what an even temper! I never saw him put out. And now it is all at
an end--nothing left of him--but what he bequeathed to Jean. Well, at
any rate you may take your oath that that man was a good and faithful
friend to the last. Even on his death-bed he did not forget us."

Jean, in his turn, held out his hand for the picture. He gazed at it for
a few minutes and then said regretf