"Those were happy times! They can never come again for him who suffers, or for me who am no longer in ignorance of it."
At nine o'clock, she at last attempted to answer Laurent's letter, but a peal of the bell made her heart beat fast. It was he! She rose to tell Catherine to say that she had gone out. Catherine returned: it was only a letter from him. Thérèse had an involuntary thrill of regret that it was not himself.
There were only these few words in the letter:
"Adieu, Thérèse! you do not love me, and I love you like a child!"
These two lines made Thérèse tremble from head to foot. The only passion that she had never striven to extinguish in her heart was maternal love. That wound, although apparently healed, was still bleeding like unsatisfied love.
"Like a child!" she repeated, crumpling the letter in her quivering hands. "He loves me like a child! Mon Dieu! what does he mean by that? does he know how he hurts me? Adieu! My boy had learned to say adieu! but he did not say it when they carried him away. I should have heard him! and I shall never hear him again!"
Thérèse was overexcited, and, as her emotion seized upon the most painful of pretexts for manifesting itself, she burst into tears.
"Did you call me?" said Catherine, entering the room. "Mon Dieu! what is the matter? You are weeping as you used to in the old days!"
"Nothing, nothing, leave me," replied Thérèse. "If any one comes to see me, say that I have gone to the theatre. I want to be alone. I am ill."
Catherine left the room, but went into the garden. She had seen Laurent creeping stealthily along the hedge.