re the son of the man who left you his fortune.
Well, then--a decent man does not take money which brings dishonor on
his mother."

"Pierre! Pierre! Pierre! Think what you are saying. You? It is you who
give utterance to this infamous thing?"

"Yes, I. It is I. Have you not seen me crushed with woe this month
past, spending my nights without sleep and my days in lurking out of
sight like an animal? I hardly know what I am doing or what will
become of me, so miserable am I, so crazed with shame and grief; for
first I guessed--and now I know it."

"Pierre! Be silent. Mother is in the next room. Remember she may
hear--she must hear."

But Pierre felt that he must unburden his heart. He told Jean all his
suspicions, his arguments, his struggles, his assurance, and the
history of the portrait--which had again disappeared. He spoke in
short broken sentences almost without coherence--the language of a
sleep-walker.

He seemed to have quite forgotten Jean, and his mother in the
adjoining room. He talked as if no one were listening, because he must
talk, because he had suffered too much and smothered and closed the
wound too tightly. It had festered like an abscess and the abscess had
burst, splashing every one. He was pacing the room in the way he
almost always did, his eyes fixed on vacancy, gesticulating in a
frenzy of despair, his voice choked with tearless sobs and revulsions
of self-loathing; he spoke as if he were making a confession of his
own misery and that of his nearest kin, as though he were casting his
woes to the deaf, invisible winds which bore away his words.

Jean, distracted and almost convinced on a sudden by his brother's
blind vehemence, was leaning against the door behind which, as he
guessed, their mother had heard them.

She could not get out, she must come through this room. She had not
come; then it was because she dared not.

Suddenly Pierre stamped his foot:

"I am a brute," he cried, "to have told you this."

And he fled, bare-headed, down the stairs.

The noise of the front-door closing with a slam roused Jean from the
deep stupor into which he had fallen. Some seconds had elapsed, longer
than hours, and his spirit had sunk into the numb torpor of idiocy. He
was conscious, indeed, that he must presently think and act, but he
would wait, refusing to understand, to know, to remember, out of fear,
weakness, cowardice. He was one of those procrastinators who put
everything off till the m