all and before any one else, that it bore a
likeness to her son. Without doubt she had for a long time been on the
watch for this resemblance; then, having detected it, having noticed
its beginnings, and understanding that any one might, any day, observe
it too, she had one evening removed the perilous little picture and
had hidden it, not daring to destroy it.

Pierre recollected quite clearly now that it was long, long before
they left Paris that the miniature had vanished. It had disappeared,
he thought, about the time when Jean's beard was beginning to grow,
which had made him suddenly and wonderfully like the fair young man
who smiled from the picture frame.

The motion of the boat as it put off disturbed and dissipated his
meditations. He stood up and looked at the sea. The little steamer,
once outside the piers, turned to the left, and puffing and snorting
and quivering, made for a distant point visible through the morning
haze. The red sail of a heavy fishing-bark, lying motionless on the
level waters, looked like a large rock standing up out of the sea. And
the Seine, rolling down from Rouen, seemed a wide inlet dividing two
neighboring lands. They reached the harbor of Trouville in less than
an hour, and as it was the time of day when the world was bathing,
Pierre went to the shore.

From a distance it looked like a garden full of gaudy flowers. All
along the stretch of yellow sand, from the pier as far as the Roches
Noires, sunshades of every hue, hats of every shape, dresses of every
color, in groups outside the bathing huts, in long rows by the margin
of the waves, or scattered here and there, really looked like immense
bouquets on a vast meadow. And the Babel of sounds--voices near and
far ringing thin in the light atmosphere, shouts and cries of children
being bathed, clear laughter of women--all made a pleasant, continuous
din, mingling with the unheeding breeze, and breathed with the air
itself.

Pierre walked on among all this throng, more lost, more remote from
them, more isolated, more drowned in his torturing thoughts, than if
he had been flung overboard from the deck of a ship a hundred miles
from shore. He passed by them and heard a few sentences without
listening; and he saw, without looking, how the men spoke to the
women, and the women smiled at the men. Then, suddenly, as if he had
awoke, he perceived them all; and hatred of them all surged up in his
soul, for they seemed happy and conte