“He has left you, hasn’t he?”
The wretched woman shivers, hesitates.
“Ask me nothing. I will say nothing. Adieu!”
He pressed her to his heart:
“What could you tell me that I do not know already, poor mother? You did not guess, then, why I left six months ago?”
“You know?”
“I know everything. And what has happened to you to-day I have foreseen for long, and hoped for.”
“Oh, wretch, wretch that I am, why did I come?”
“Because it is your home, because you owe me ten years of my mother. You see now that I must keep you.”
He said all this on his knees, before the sofa on which she had let herself fall, in a flood of tears, and the last painful sobs of her wounded pride. She wept thus for long, her child at her feet. And now the Joyeuse family, anxious because Andre did not come down, hurried up in a troop to look for him. It was an invasion of innocent faces, transparent gaiety, floating curls, modest dress, and over all the group shone the big lamp, the good old lamp with the vast shade which M. Joyeuse solemnly carried, as high, as straight as he could, with the gesture of a caryatid. Suddenly they stopped before this pale and sad lady, who looked, touched to the depths, at all this smiling grace, above all at Elise, a little behind the others, whose conscious air in this indiscreet visit points her out as the fiancee.