are so kind,
Monsieur, will you allow my mother, who's there in the corridor, waiting
for me, to come and speak to me?

THE RECORDER. I'll send her in to you. Good-bye.

ETCHEPARE. Good-bye.

SCENE III:--_The recorder goes out. Enter Etchepare's mother._

ETCHEPARE [_pressing his mother's head against his breast_] Poor old
mother--how the misery of these three months has changed you!

THE MOTHER. My poor boy, how you must have suffered!

ETCHEPARE. That woman!

THE MOTHER. Yes, they've just been telling me.

ETCHEPARE. For ten years I've lived with that thief--that wretched
woman! How she lied! Ah! When I heard that judge say to her, "You were
convicted of theft and complicity with your lover," and when, before all
those people, she owned to it--I tell you, mummy, I thought the skies
were falling on my head--and when she admitted she'd been that man's
mistress--I don't know just what happened--nor which I would have killed
soonest--the judge who said such things so calmly or her who admitted
them with her back turned to me. And then I was on the point of
confessing myself guilty--I, an innocent man--in order not to learn any
more--to get away--but I thought of you and the children! [_A long
pause_] Come! We've got to make up our minds what we're going to do. You
left them at home?

THE MOTHER. No. I had to send them to our cousin at Bayonne. We've no
longer got a home--we've nothing--we are ruined. Besides, I've got a
horror of this place now. The women edge away and make signs to one
another when I meet them, and in the church they leave me all alone in
the middle of an empty space. Already--I had to take the children away
from school.

ETCHEPARE. My God!

THE MOTHER. No one would speak to them. One day Georges picked a quarrel
with the biggest, and they fought, and as Georges got the better of it,
the other, to revenge himself, called him the son of a gallows-bird.

ETCHEPARE. And Georges?

THE MOTHER. He came home crying and wouldn't go out of doors. It was
then that I sent them away to Bayonne.

ETCHEPARE. That's what we'll do. Go away. We'll go and fetch them.
To-morrow or to-night I shall be with you again. There are emigration
companies there--boats to America--they'll send all four of us--they'll
give us credit for the voyage on account of the children.

THE MOTHER. And when they ask for their mother--

ETCHEPARE [_after a pause_] You'll tell them she's dead.

SCENE IV:--_Yanetta is sh