Poor old Keremenen was quite helpless, and the affair came very near to being utterly odious and pitiful, when we heard Marie weeping; they were the first tears of her wifehood, urgent, bitter tears, the forerunners, no doubt, of many others; and sobs which were distressing to hear amid the silence which we all preserved.
And presently Yves was vanquished and drew near slowly to embrace her:
"Come, come! I am wrong," he said, "and I ask you to forgive me."
And then he came to me and used a name which he had sometimes written, but which until then he had never pronounced:
"You must forgive me again, brother!"
And he embraced me also.
Afterwards he begged forgiveness of the old Keremenens, who kissed him in a fatherly and motherly way; and forgiveness also of his son, the little sea-gull, as he pressed his lips against the little closed fists which peeped out of the cradle.
He was quite sobered and the evil hour had passed; the real Yves, my brother, had returned; there was as always in his repentance something simple and childlike which won forgiveness without reserve, so that all was forgotten.
He proceeded now to pick his clothes up from the floor, to brush them, and to dress himself again, without saying a word, miserable, exhausted, wiping his forehead which was beaded with a cold perspiration.
An hour later I watched Yves as he stooped, the very figure of an athlete, over the cradle of his son; he had been rocking him and had just succeeded in putting him to sleep; and now, little by little, progressively, with many precautions, he was stopping the movement of the little oak basket, to leave it at last motionless, seeing that sleep had indeed come. Then he stooped lower still and gazed intently at his son, examining him with much curiosity, as if he had never seen him before, touching his little closed fists, his growth of little mouse's hair which peeped still from beneath the little white bonnet.