verything--and nothing to Pierre.

The more he thought, the more he recalled the past few years, the more
extraordinary, the more incredible was it that he should have made
such a difference between them. And an agonizing pang of unspeakable
anguish piercing his bosom made his heart beat like a fluttering rag.
Its springs seemed broken, and the blood rushed through in a flood,
unchecked, tossing it with wild surges.

Then in an undertone, as a man speaks in a nightmare, he muttered: "I
must know. My God! I must know."

He looked further back now, to an earlier time, when his parents had
lived in Paris. But the faces escaped him, and this confused his
recollections. He struggled above all to see Marechal with light, or
brown, or black hair. But he could not; the later image, his face as
an old man, blotted out all others. However, he remembered that he had
been slighter, and had a soft hand, and that he often brought flowers.
Very often--for his father would constantly say: "What, another
bouquet! But this is madness, my dear fellow; you will ruin yourself
in roses." And Marechal would say: "No matter; I like it."

And suddenly his mother's voice and accent, his mother's as she smiled
and said: "Thank you, my kind friend," flashed on his brain, so
clearly that he could have believed he heard her. She must have spoken
those words very often that they should remain thus graven on her
son's memory.

So Marechal brought flowers; he, the gentleman, the rich man, the
customer, to the humble shop-keeper, the jeweler's wife. Had he loved
her? Why should he have made friends with these tradespeople if he had
not been in love with the wife? He was a man of education and fairly
refined tastes. How many a time had he discussed poets and poetry with
Pierre. He did not appreciate these writers from an artistic point of
view, but with sympathetic and responsive feeling. The doctor had
often smiled at his emotions which had struck him as rather silly; now
he plainly saw that this sentimental soul could never, never have been
the friend of his father, who was so matter-of-fact, so narrow, so
heavy, to whom the word "Poetry" meant idiocy.

This Marechal then, being young, free, rich, ready for any form of
tenderness, went by chance into the shop one day, having perhaps
observed its pretty mistress. He had bought something, had come again,
had chatted, more intimately each time, paying by frequent purchases
for the right of a seat i