"So you finally decided to come?"
"I wanted a walk, and it landed me here. I have not seen the place for so long! It's just as it always was, it seems."
His eyes wandered over the asphalt-covered terrace; he examined the busts, one after the other, with more curiosity than was natural.
"You're almost always here now, aren't you?" he said, in order to say something, to escape the embarrassing intervals of silence which he foresaw would grow longer and more frequent.
"Yes; I come here often now, and stay here," replied his father, with a shade of sadness in his voice which surprised his son. "I believe the air does me good—since my heart began to trouble me."
"Is your heart affected?" cried George, turning towards him with sincere emotion, struck by the unexpectedness of the news. "How? Since when? I never knew anything of it—nobody has ever breathed a word of it to me."
He looked now at his father's face, in the strong light shed by the sun's oblique rays and reflected by the wall, and fancied he could detect the symptoms of the mortal malady. And it was with sympathetic compassion that he remarked the deep wrinkles, the swollen, worried-looking eyes, the white hairs that bristled on the unshaven cheeks and chin, his mustache and hair to which the dye gave an indefinite color between a greenish and a violet, the thick lips through which the respiration came like the gasping of asthma, the short neck which appeared to be colored by an extravasation of blood.
"Since when?" he repeated, without concealing his anxiety.
And he felt his repugnance to this man diminish as a rapid succession of images, clear almost as the reality might be, represented him beneath the menace of death, disfigured by the death agony.
"Does one ever know when it begins?" answered his father, who, in the presence of his son's sincere emotion, exaggerated his suffering in order to sustain and increase a pity by which he might succeed perhaps in profiting. "Can one ever tell when it begins? These kind of maladies breed for years; and then, one fine day, suddenly make their presence felt. Then there is no remedy. One must be resigned, await the end from one minute to another——"