She now felt that she had been very imprudent in considering Hubert's health too delicate, and in being, moreover, too desirous of his presence to give him a profession. She was ingenious enough to tell herself that she ought to enliven their solitude, and, for the first time during her widowhood, she gave some large dinner-parties. The doors of the house were thrown open. The chandeliers were lighted. The old silver plate, with the De Trans' arms upon it, adorned the table, around which crowded some old people, and some charming young girls as elegant and pretty as the De Trans' cousins were countrified and awkward. But since Hubert had been in love with Theresa he had, with a sweet exaggeration of fidelity, forbidden himself ever to look at any woman but her. And then it was the month of May. The days were warm and bright. His mistress and he had ventured upon excursions in some of the woods which surround Paris--at Saint Cloud, at Chaville, and in the Forest of Marly. Sitting in the dining-room in the Rue Vaneau, Hubert would recall Theresa's smile on offering him a flower, the alternation of sunlight and shadow from the foliage upon her forehead, the paleness of her complexion among the greenness, a gesture that she had made, the turn of her foot on the grass of a pathway. If he listened to the conversation it was to compare the talk of Madame Liauran's guests with the repartees of Madame de Sauve. The first abounded in prejudice, which is the inevitable ransom of all very profound moral life. The second were impregnated with that Parisian wit the sad vacuity of which was no longer apparent to the young man. He assisted, then, at his mother's dinners with the face of one whose soul was elsewhere. "Ah! what can I do--what can I do?" sobbed Madame Liauran; "everything wearies him of us, and everything amuses him with that woman. "Wait," replied Madame Castel. Wait! It is Wisdom's last word; but the impassioned soul devours itself grievously in the waiting. As for Marie Alice, whose life was wholly concentrated upon her child, every hour now was turning the knife about in the wound. She found it impossible not to abandon herself ceaselessly to that inquisition into petty details to which the noblest jealousies are victims. She noticed in her son every new trifle such as young men wear, and asked herself whether some memory of his guilty love was not attached to it.