'You did not think me guilty, Thérèse?'
'No, François, I assure you.'
'This morning, in the sad solitude in which I found myself, I was still ignorant of everything.... But I happened to glance at an old newspaper, and then I hastened here. How is Rose?'
'She is much better. She is there, in the bedroom.'
François had not dared to kiss his wife. She stood before him, erect and severe amid her emotion. But Marc, who had risen, caught hold of his grandson's hands, guessing by his pallor, his ravaged face, which still bore traces of his tears, that he had been involved in some tragic drama.
'Come, tell me everything, my poor lad.'
Then François, in a few quivering words and with all sincerity, recounted his folly—his sudden flight from Maillebois on the arm of that Colette who had maddened him; their life of seclusion in a lonely district of Beaumont, where they had scarcely quitted their room; a fortnight's cloistered life, interspersed with furious storms, extravagant caprices on the part of that passionate gipsy, reproaches, tears, and even blows; then, all at once, her flight nobody knew whither, after a last scene when she had flung the furniture at her lover's head. That had happened three weeks previously, and at first he had awaited her return, then buried himself, as it were, in the seclusion of that lonely room, full of despair and remorse, no longer knowing how to return to Maillebois to his wife, whom he declared he had never ceased to love in spite of all his folly.
While he spoke, Thérèse, who was still standing there, had turned her head aside. And when he had finished she said, 'There is no occasion for me to know those things.... I merely understand that you have come back to answer the charges brought against you.'
'Oh!' Marc gently observed, 'those charges have now ceased to exist.'