"Good-morning, Lison!"
A man-servant announced:
"Dinner is ready, madame."
And they proceeded toward the dining-room.
What passed at this dinner? What did they say to him, and what could
he say in reply? He found himself plunged in one of those strange
dreams which border on insanity. He gazed at the two women with a
fixed idea in his mind, a morbid, self-contradictory idea:
"Which is the real one?"
The mother smiled, repeating over and over again:
"Do you remember?" And it was in the bright eyes of the young girl
that he found again his memories of the past. Twenty times he opened
his mouth to say to her: "Do you remember, Lison?" forgetting this
white-haired lady who was looking at him tenderly.
And yet, there were moments when he no longer felt sure, when he lost
his head. He could see that the woman of to-day was not exactly the
woman of long ago. The other one, the former one, had in her voice, in
her glances, in her entire being, something which he did not find
again. And he made prodigious efforts of mind to recall his lady love,
to seize again what had escaped from her, what this resuscitated one
did not possess.
The baronne said: