him to ask why this resemblance suddenly disappeared?

It would be dangerous to expose himself to this question from the
lawyer, but it would be much more dangerous coming from Phillis.
Nougarede would only show surprise; Phillis might ask for an
explanation.

And he must reply to her so much the more clearly, because four or five
times already he had almost betrayed himself as to Madame Dammauville,
and if she had let his explanations or embarrassment pass, his
hesitations or his refusal, without questioning him frankly, certainly
she was not the less astonished. Should he appear before her with short
hair and no beard, it would be a new astonishment which, added to the
others, would establish suspicions; and logically, by the force of
things, in spite of herself, in spite of her love and her faith, she
would arrive at conclusions from which she would not be able to free
herself. Already, five or six months before, this question of long hair
and beard had been agitated between them. As he complained one day of
the bourgeois who would not come to him, she gently explained to him
that to please and attract these bourgeois it was, perhaps, not quite
well to astonish those whom one does not shock. That overcoats less
long, hats with less brim, and hair and beard shorter; in fact, a
general appearance that more nearly approached their own, would be,
perhaps, more agreeable. He became angry, and replied plainly that such
concessions were not in keeping with his character. How could he now
abruptly make these concessions, and at a time when his success at the
examinations placed him above such small compromises? He resisted when
he needed help, and when a patient was an affair of life or death to
him; he yielded when he had need of no one, and when he did not care for
patients. The contradiction was truly too strong, and such that it could
not but strike Phillis, whose attention had already had only too much to
arouse it.

And yet, as dangerous as it was to come to the decision to make himself
unrecognizable, it would be madness on his part to draw back; the sooner
the better. His fault had been in not foreseeing, the day after Caffie's
death, that circumstances might arise sooner or later which would force
it upon him. At that moment it did not present the same dangers as now;
but parting from the idea that he had not been seen by any one, that
he could not have been seen, he had rejoiced in the security that this
convic