ed alone through the
darkness he would rack his memory and his reason with a minute search
that should bring out the blazing truth. Then there would be an end to
the matter; he would not think of it again--never. He would go and
sleep.

He argued thus: "Let me see: first to examine the facts; then I will
recall all I know about him, his behavior to my brother and to me. I
will seek out the causes which might have given rise to this
preference. He knew Jean from his birth? Yes, but he had known me
first. If he had loved my mother silently, unselfishly, he would
surely have chosen me, since it was through me, through my scarlet
fever, that he became so intimate with my parents. Logically, then, he
ought to have preferred me, to have had a keener affection for
me--unless it were that he felt an instinctive attraction and
predilection for my brother as he watched him grow up."

Then, with desperate tension of brain and of all the powers of his
intellect, he strove to reconstitute from memory the image of this
Marechal, to see him, to know him, to penetrate the man whom he had
seen pass by him, indifferent to his heart during all those years in
Paris.

But he perceived that the slight exertion of walking somewhat
disturbed his ideas, dislocated their continuity, weakened their
precision, clouded his recollection. To enable him to look at the past
and at unknown events with so keen an eye that nothing should escape
it, he must be motionless in a vast and empty space. And he made up
his mind to go and sit on the jetty as he had done that other night.
As he approached the harbor he heard, out at sea, a lugubrious and
sinister wail like the bellowing of a bull, but more long-drawn and
steady. It was the roar of a fog-horn, the cry of a ship lost in the
fog. A shiver ran through him, chilling his heart; so deeply did this
cry of distress thrill his soul and nerves that he felt as if he had
uttered it himself. Another and a similar voice answered with such
another moan, but further away; then, close by, the fog-horn on the
pier gave out a fearful sound in answer. Pierre made for the jetty
with long steps, thinking no more of anything, content to walk on into
this ominous and bellowing darkness.

When he had seated himself at the end of the breakwater he closed his
eyes, that he might not see the two electric lights, now blurred by
the fog, which make the harbor accessible at night, and the red glare
of the light on the south