when Annette spoke, and he happened to be looking elsewhere,
he was compelled to ask: "Which of you said that?" He often amused
himself by playing this game of confusion when all three were alone in
the drawing-room with the Louis XV tapestries. He would close his eyes
and beg them to ask him the same question, the one after the other, and
then change the order of the interrogations, so that he might recognize
their voices. They did this with so much cleverness in imitating each
other's intonations, in saying the same phrases with the same accents,
that often he could not tell which spoke. In fact, they had come to
speak so much alike that the servants answered "Yes, Madame" to the
daughter and "Yes, Mademoiselle" to the mother.

From imitating each other's voices and movements for amusement,
they acquired such a similarity of gait and gesture that Monsieur de
Guilleroy himself, when he saw one or the other pass through the shadowy
end of the drawing-room, confounded them for an instant and asked: "Is
that you, Annette, or is it your mamma?"

From this resemblance, natural and assumed, was engendered in the mind
and heart of the painter a strange impression of a double entity, old
and young, wise yet ignorant, two bodies made, the one after the other,
with the same flesh; in fact, the same woman continued, but rejuvenated,
having become once more what she was formerly. Thus he lived near them,
shared between them, uneasy, troubled, feeling for the mother his old
ardor awakened, and for the daughter an indefinable tenderness.

PART II

CHAPTER I

A WILLING ENVOY

"Paris, July 20, 11 P. M.

"MY FRIEND: My mother has just died at Roncieres. We shall leave here at
midnight. Do not come, for we have told no one. But pity me and think of
me. YOUR ANY."

"July 21, 12 M.

"MY POOR FRIEND: I should have gone, notwithstanding what you wrote, if
I had not become used to regarding all your wishes as commands. I have
thought of you with poignant grief ever since last night. I think of
that silent journey you made, sitting opposite your daughter and your
husband, in that dimly-lighted carriage, which bore you toward your
dead. I could see all three of you under the oil lamp, you weeping and
Annette sobbing. I saw your arrival at the station, the entrance of
the castle in the midst of a group of servants, your rush up the stairs
toward that room, toward that bed where she lies, your first look at
her, and