old house spoke to them
of their childhood, of their parents dead and gone, of the far-away days
when they had loved and suffered there. Beneath the window lay the
garden, now icy cold, which once, under the sunbeams, had re-echoed with
their play. On the left was the laboratory, the spacious room where their
father had taught them to read. On the right, in the dining-room, they
could picture their mother cutting bread and butter for them, and looking
so gentle with her big, despairing eyes--those of a believer mated to an
infidel. And the feeling that they were now alone in that home, and the
pale, sleepy gleam of the lamp, and the deep silence of the garden and
the house, and the very past itself, all filled them with the softest of
emotion blended with the keenest bitterness.

* See M. Zola's "Lourdes," Day I., Chapter II.

They would have liked to talk and unbosom themselves. But what could they
say to one another? Although their hands remained so tightly clasped, did
not the most impassable of chasms separate them? In any case, they
thought so. Guillaume was convinced that Pierre was a saint, a priest of
the most robust faith, without a doubt, without aught in common with
himself, whether in the sphere of ideas or in that of practical life. A
hatchet-stroke had parted them, and each lived in a different world. And
in the same way Pierre pictured Guillaume as one who had lost caste,
whose conduct was most suspicious, who had never even married the mother
of his three children, but was on the point of marrying that girl who was
far too young for him, and who had come nobody knew whence. In him,
moreover, were blended the passionate ideas of a _savant_ and a
revolutionist, ideas in which one found negation of everything,
acceptance and possibly provocation of the worst forms of violence, with
a glimpse of the vague monster of Anarchism underlying all. And so, on
what basis could there be any understanding between them, since each
retained his prejudices against the other, and saw him on the opposite
side of the chasm, without possibility of any plank being thrown across
it to enable them to unite? Thus, all alone in that room, their poor
hearts bled with distracted brotherly love.

Pierre knew that, on a previous occasion, Guillaume had narrowly escaped
being compromised in an Anarchist affair. He asked him no questions, but
he could not help reflecting that he would not have hidden himself in
this fashion had he