ll these people were happy, and were sleeping in their warm
beds. Five years passed thus; five miserable years. But one day, when he
was taking his usual walk between the Madeleine and the Rue Drouot, he
suddenly saw a lady whose bearing struck him. A tall gentleman and a
child were with her, and all three were walking in front of him. He
asked himself where he had seen them before, when suddenly he recognized
a movement of her hand; it was his wife, his wife with Limousin and his
child, his little George.

His heart beat as if it would suffocate him, but he did not stop, for he
wished to see them, and he followed them. They looked like a family
of the better middle class. Henriette was leaning on Paul's arm,
and speaking to him in a low voice, and looking at him sideways
occasionally. Parent got a side view of her and recognized her pretty
features, the movements of her lips, her smile, and her coaxing glances.
But the child chiefly took up his attention. How tall and strong he was!
Parent could not see his face, but only his long, fair curls. That tall
boy with bare legs, who was walking by his mother's side like a little
man, was George. He saw them suddenly, all three, as they stopped in
front of a shop. Limousin had grown very gray, had aged and was thinner;
his wife, on the contrary, was as young looking as ever, and had grown
stouter. George he would not have recognized, he was so different from
what he had been formerly.

They went on again and Parent followed them. He walked on quickly,
passed them, and then turned round, so as to meet them face to face. As
he passed the child he felt a mad longing to take him into his arms and
run off with him, and he knocked against him as if by accident. The boy
turned round and looked at the clumsy man angrily, and Parent hurried
away, shocked, hurt, and pursued by that look. He went off like a thief,
seized with a horrible fear lest he should have been seen and recognized
by his wife and her lover. He went to his cafe without stopping, and
fell breathless into his chair. That evening he drank three absinthes.
For four months he felt the pain of that meeting in his heart. Every
night he saw the three again, happy and tranquil, father, mother, and
child walking on the boulevard before going in to dinner, and that new
vision effaced the old one. It was another matter, another hallucination
now, and also a fresh pain. Little George, his little George, the
child he had so much