ling, my daughter, Julie, my Julie!" sobbed the widow
Gamelin,--and pressed her streaming cheeks to the girl's.

For some moments they clung together without a word. The poor mother
was racking her brains for some way of helping her daughter, and Julie
was watching the kind look in those tearful eyes.

"Perhaps," thought Evariste's mother, "perhaps, if I speak to him, he
will be melted. He is good, he is tender-hearted. If politics had not
hardened him, if he had not been influenced by the Jacobins, he would
never have had these cruel feelings, that terrify me because I cannot
understand them."

She took Julie's head in her two hands:

"Listen, my child. I will speak to Evariste. I will sound him, get him
to see you and hear your story. The sight of you might anger him; his
first impulse might be to turn against you.... And then, I know him;
this costume would offend him; he is uncompromising in everything that
touches morals, that shocks the proprieties. _I_ was a bit startled to
see my Julie dressed as a man."

"Oh! mother, the emigration and the fearful disorders of the kingdom
have made these disguises quite a common thing. They are adopted in
order to follow a trade, to escape recognition, to get a borrowed
passport or a certificate approved. In London I saw young Girey dressed
as a girl,--and he made a very pretty girl; you must own, mother, _that_
is a more scandalous disguise than mine."

"My poor child, you have no need to justify yourself in my eyes, whether
in this or any other thing. I am your mother; for me you will always be
blameless. I will speak to Evariste, I will say...."

She broke off. She knew what her son was; she felt it in her heart, but
she would not believe it, she _would_ not know it.

"He is kind-hearted. He will do it for my sake ... for your sake, he
will do what I ask him."

The two women, weary to the death, fell silent. Julie sank asleep, her
head pillowed on the knees where she had rested as a child, while the
mother, the rosary between her hands, wept, like another _mater
dolorosa_, over the calamities she felt drawing stealthily nearer and
nearer in the silence of this day of snow when everything was hushed,
footsteps and carriage wheels and the very heaven itself.

Suddenly, with a keenness of hearing sharpened by anxiety, she caught
the sound of her son's steps on the stairs.

"Evariste!" she cried. "Hide"--and she hurried the girl into the
bedroom.

"How are you to-