."

Mme. Roland calmly replied:

"Yes, I know where it is. I will fetch it presently."

Then she had lied! When she had said that very morning to her son, who
had asked her what had become of the miniature: "I don't exactly
know--perhaps it is in my desk"--it was a lie! She had seen it,
touched it, handled it, gazed at it but a few days since; and then she
had hidden it away again in the secret drawer with those letters--his
letters.

Pierre looked at the mother who had lied to him; looked at her with
the concentrated fury of a son who had been cheated, robbed of his
most sacred affection, and with the jealous wrath of a man who, after
long being blind, at last discovers a disgraceful betrayal. If he had
been that woman's husband--and not her child--he would have gripped
her by the wrists, seized her by the shoulders or the hair, have flung
her on the ground, have hit her, hurt her, crushed her! And he might
say nothing, do nothing, show nothing, reveal nothing. He was her son;
he had no vengeance to take. And he had not been deceived.

Nay, but she had deceived his tenderness, his pious respect. She owed
to him to be without reproach, as all mothers owe it to their
children. If the fury that boiled within him verged on hatred it was
that he felt her to be even more guilty toward him than toward his
father.

The love of man and wife is a voluntary compact in which the one who
proves weak is guilty only of perfidy; but when the wife is a mother
her duty is a higher one, since nature has intrusted her with a race.
If she fails then she is cowardly, worthless, infamous.

"I do not care," said Roland suddenly, stretching out his legs under
the table, as he did every evening while he sipped his glass of
black-currant brandy, "You may do worse than live idle when you have a
snug little income. I hope Jean will have us to dinner in style now.
Hang it all! if I have an indigestion now and then I cannot help it."

Then turning to his wife he added:

"Go and fetch that portrait, little woman, as you have done your
dinner. I should like to see it again myself."

She rose, took a taper, and went. Then, after an absence which Pierre
thought long, though she was not away more than three minutes, Mme.
Roland returned smiling, and holding an old-fashioned gilt frame by
the ring.

"Here it is," said she, "I found it at once."

The doctor was the first to put forth his hand; he took the picture,
and holding it a little aw