n the family, of smiling at the young wife
and shaking hands with the husband.

And what next--what next--good God--what next?

He had loved and petted the first child, the jeweler's child, till the
second was born; then, till death, he had remained impenetrable; and
when his grave was closed, his flesh dust, his name erased from the
list of the living, when he himself was quiet and forever gone, having
nothing to scheme for, to dread or to hide, he had given his whole
fortune to the second child! Why?

The man had all his wits; he must have understood and foreseen that he
might, that he almost infallibly must, give grounds for the
supposition that the child was his. He was casting obloquy on a woman.
How could he have done this if Jean were not his son?

And suddenly a clear and fearful recollection shot through his brain.
Marechal was fair--fair like Jean. He now remembered a little
miniature portrait he had seen formerly in Paris, on the drawing-room
chimney-shelf, and which had since disappeared. Where was it? Lost, or
hidden away? Oh, if he could but have it in his hands for one minute!
His mother kept it perhaps in the unconfessed drawer where love-tokens
were treasured.

His misery at this thought was so intense that he uttered a groan, one
of those brief moans wrung from the breast by a too intolerable pang.
And immediately, as if it had heard him, as if it had understood and
answered him, the fog-horn on the pier bellowed out close to him. Its
voice, like that of a fiendish monster, more resonant than thunder--a
savage and appalling roar contrived to drown the clamor of the wind
and waves--spread through the darkness, across the sea, which was
invisible under its shroud of fog. And again, through the mist, far
and near, responsive cries went up to the night. They were terrifying,
these calls given forth by the great blind steam-ships.

Then all was silent once more.

Pierre had opened his eyes and was looking about him, startled to find
himself here, roused from his nightmare.

"I am mad," thought he, "I suspect my mother." And a surge of love and
emotion, of repentance and prayer and grief, welled up in his heart.
His mother! Knowing her as he knew her, how could he ever have
suspected her? Was not the soul, was not the life of this
simple-minded, chaste, and loyal woman clearer than water? Could any
one who had seen and known her ever think of her but as above
suspicion? And he, her son, had doubted