nce, when he thought of the other, of little Lise, of the
dainty Cinder-Flower. What then had become of her, the former one, the
one he had loved? that woman of far-off dreams, the blonde with gray
eyes, the young one who used to call him "Jaquelet" so prettily?

They remained side by side, motionless, both constrained, troubled,
profoundly ill at ease.

As they only talked in commonplace phrases, broken and slow, she rose
up, and pressed the button of the bell.

"I am going to call Renee," she said.

There was a tap at the door, then the rustle of a dress; next, a young
voice exclaimed:

"Here I am, mamma!"

Lormerin remained scared, as if at the sight of an apparition.

He stammered:

"Good-day, Mademoiselle."

Then, turning towards the mother:

"Oh! it is you!..."

In fact, it was she, she whom he had known in bygone days, the Lise
who had vanished and come back! In her he found the woman he had won
twenty-five years before. This one was even younger still, fresher,
more childlike.

He felt a wild desire to open his arms, to clasp her to his heart
again, murmuring in her ear:

"Good-day, Lison!"

A man-servant announced:

"Dinner is ready, Madame."

And they proceeded towards the dining-room.

What passed at this dinner? What did they say to him, and what could
he say in reply? He found himself plunged in one of those strange
dreams which border on insanity. He gazed at the two women with a
fixed idea in his mind, a morbid, self-contradictory idea:

"Which is the real one?"

The mother smiled, repeating over and over again:

"Do you remember?" And it was in the bright eye of the young girl that
he found again his memories of the past. Twenty times he opened his
mouth to say to her: "Do you remember, Lison?--" forgetting this
white-haired lady who was regarding him with looks of tenderness.

And yet there were moments when he no longer felt sure, when he lost
his head. He could see that the woman of to-day was not exactly the
woman of long ago. The other one, the former one, had in her voice, in
her glance, in her entire being, something which he did not find
again. And he made prodigious efforts of mind to recall his lady love,
to seize again what had escaped from her to him, what this
resuscitated one did not possess.

The Baronne said:

"You have lost your old sprightliness, my poor friend."

He murmured:

"There are many other things that I have lost!"

But in his heart touched