She answered sharply,
“It is very easy for Mademoiselle Prefere to be good to me, and it would be very difficult indeed for me to be good to her.”
I then said, in a still more serious tone:
“My child, the authority of a teacher is sacred. You must consider your schoolmistress as occupying the place to you of the mother whom you lost.”
I had scarcely uttered this solemn stupidity when I bitterly regretted it. The child turned pale, and the tears sprang to her eyes.
“Oh, Monsieur!” she cried, “how could you say such a thing—YOU? You never knew mamma!”
Ay, just Heaven! I did know her mamma. And how indeed could I have been foolish enough to have said what I did?
She repeated, as if to herself:
“Mamma! my dear mamma! my poor mamma!”
A lucky chance prevented me from playing the fool any further. I do not know how it happened at that moment I looked as if I was going to cry. At my age one does not cry. It must have been a bad cough which brought the tears into my eyes. But, anyhow, appearances were in my favour. Jeanne was deceived by them. Oh! what a pure and radiant smile suddenly shone out under her beautiful wet eyelashes—like sunshine among branches after a summer shower! We took each other by the hand and sat a long while without saying a word—absolutely happy. Those celestial harmonies which I once thought I heard thrilling through my soul while I knelt before that tomb to which a saintly woman had guided me, suddenly awoke again in my heart, slow-swelling through the blissful moments with infinite softness. Doubtless the child whose hand pressed my own also heard them; and then, elevated by their enchantment above the material world, the poor old man and the artless young girl both knew that a tender ghostly Presence was making sweetness all about them.