re
it is."

"What is that?" asked Roland. And Pierre answered:

"A little likeness of Marechal which used to be in the dining-room in
Paris. I thought that Jean might be glad to have it."

Roland exclaimed:

"Why, yes, to be sure; I remember it perfectly. I saw it again last
week. Your mother found it in her desk when she was tidying the papers.
It was on Thursday or Friday. Do you remember, Louise? I was shaving
myself when you took it out and laid in on a chair by your side with a
pile of letters of which you burned half. Strange, isn't it, that you
should have come across the portrait only two or three days before Jean
heard of his legacy? If I believed in presentiments I should think that
this was one."

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 towards 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