id in a whisper:

"Do not speak of that any more, mother."

"Is that possible? I think of nothing else."

"You will forget it."

Again she was silent; then with deep regret she said:

"How happy I might have been, married to another man!"

She was visiting it on Roland now, throwing all the responsibility of
her sin on his ugliness, his stupidity, his clumsiness, the heaviness of
his intellect, and the vulgarity of his person. It was to this that it
was owing that she had betrayed him, had driven one son to desperation,
and had been forced to utter to the other the most agonizing confession
that can make a mother's heart bleed. She muttered: "It is so frightful
for a young girl to have to marry such a husband as mine."

Jean made no reply. He was thinking 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 ami