gh to be an honest man. No one with the same clear
vision as myself of what might happen would have hesitated any more than
I did."

"So you regret nothing?"

He took her hand and, sadly:

"Oh, mother, how can you talk like that, you who know me? How can I be
indifferent to all this break-up around me?"

He spoke the words with such despondency that she received an insight
into his distress. But her anger with him was too great and especially
their natures were too different for her to be touched by it. She
concluded:

"No matter, my boy, it's all your fault. If you had not listened to
Suzanne...."

He did not reply. The accusation cut into the most sensitive part of a
wound which nothing could allay; and he was not the man to seek excuses.

"Come," said his mother.

She took him to another room on the second floor, further than the first
from that which Marthe occupied:

"Victor will bring you your bag and serve your meals in here; that will
be best. And I will let your wife know."

"Give her this letter, which I got ready for her," he said. "It is only
asking for an interview, an explanation. She can't refuse."

*
* *

In this way, in the course of that Tuesday, the Morestal family were
once more gathered under the same roof; but in what heart-rending
conditions! And how great was the hatred that now divided those beings
once united by so warm an affection!

Philippe felt the disaster in a way that was, so to speak, visible and
palpable, during these hours in which each of his victims remained
locked up, as though in a torture-chamber. Nothing could have distracted
his mind from its obsession, and even the fear of that accursed war
which he had not been able to avert.

And yet news reached him at every moment, threatening news, like the
news of a plague that comes nearer and nearer, despite the distance,
despite the intervening waters.

At lunch-time, it was Victor, who had hardly entered the room with
Philippe's tray before he exclaimed:

"Have you heard of the telegram from England, sir? The British premier
has declared in parliament that, if war came, he would land a hundred
thousand men at Brest and Cherbourg. That means an open alliance."

Later on, he heard the gardener's son, Henriot, returning on his bicycle
from Saint-Elophe, shouting to his father and Victor:

"There's a mutiny at Strasburg! They're barricading the s