ould you do if he were dead?" he asked Phillis.

"Would it not be better for him?"

"But he will return."

"In what condition?"

"Are we the masters of fate?"

"We weep, we do not complain."

But he complained of the weeping faces that surrounded him, the tears
they concealed from him, the sighs they stifled. Ordinarily he was
tender and affectionate to his mother-in-law, with attention and
deference which in some ways seemed affected, as if he were so by will
rather than by natural sentiment; but at these times he forgot this
tenderness, and treated her with hardness so unjust, that more than once
Madame Cormier spoke of it to her daughter.

"How can your husband, who is so good to me, be so merciless regarding
Florentin? One would say that our sadness produces on him the effect of
a reproach that we would address to him."

One day when things had gone farther than usual, she had the courage to
speak to him plainly: "Forgive me for burdening you with the weariness
of our disgrace," she said to him. "When I complain of everything, of
men and things, you should remember that you are the exception, you who
have done everything to save him."

But these few words which she believed would calm the irritation of her
son-in-law, had on the contrary exasperated him; he left her, furious.

"I do not understand your husband at all," she said to her daughter.
"Will you not explain to me what the matter is with him?"

How could she give her mother the explanation that she could not give
herself? Having reached an unfathomable abyss, she dared not even lean
over to look into its depths; and instead of going on in the path where
she was pledged in spite of herself, she made every effort to return, or
at least to stop.

What good would it do to find out why he was so peculiar, and what
it was that he took so much pains to conceal? This could only be idle
curiosity on her part, for which she would be punished sooner or later.

Turning these thoughts over continually in her mind she lost her gayety,
her power to resist blows of fate, such as the small trials of life,
which formerly made her courageous; her vigorous elasticity sunk under
the heavy weight with which it was charged, and her smiling eyes now
more often expressed anxiety than happiness and confidence.

In spite of her watchfulness over herself she was not able to hide the
change from Saniel, for it manifested itself in everything--in her face
formerly so ope