formal promise from him. She talked until they reached Plassans.
Then, suddenly, as the landau rolled over the pavement of the faubourg,
she said:

"But look! there is his mother. That stout blond at the door there."

At the threshold of a harness-maker's shop hung round with horse
trappings and halters, Justine sat, knitting a stocking, taking the air,
while the little girl and boy were playing on the ground at her feet.
And behind them in the shadow of the shop was to be seen Thomas, a
stout, dark man, occupied in repairing a saddle.

Maxime leaned forward without emotion, simply curious. He was greatly
surprised at sight of this robust woman of thirty-two, with so sensible
and so commonplace an air, in whom there was not a trace of the wild
little girl with whom he had been in love when both of the same age were
entering their seventeenth year. Perhaps a pang shot through his heart
to see her plump and tranquil and blooming, while he was ill and already
aged.

"I should never have recognized her," he said.

And the landau, still rolling on, turned into the Rue de Rome. Justine
had disappeared; this vision of the past--a past so different from the
present--had sunk into the shadowy twilight, with Thomas, the children,
and the shop.

At La Souleiade the table was set; Martine had an eel from the Viorne,
a _sauted_ rabbit, and a leg of mutton. Seven o'clock was striking, and
they had plenty of time to dine quietly.

"Don't be uneasy," said Dr. Pascal to his nephew. "We will accompany you
to the station; it is not ten minutes' walk from here. As you left your
trunk, you have nothing to do but to get your ticket and jump on board
the train."

Then, meeting Clotilde in the vestibule, where she was hanging up her
hat and her umbrella, he said to her in an undertone:

"Do you know that I am uneasy about your brother?"

"Why so?"

"I have observed him attentively. I don't like the way in which he
walks; and have you noticed what an anxious look he has at times?
That has never deceived me. In short, your brother is threatened with
ataxia."

"Ataxia!" she repeated turning very pale.

A cruel image rose before her, that of a neighbor, a man still young,
whom for the past ten years she had seen driven about in a little
carriage by a servant. Was not this infirmity the worst of all ills, the
ax stroke that separates a living being from social and active life?

"But," she murmured, "he complains only of rheumatism