Madame Chazel felt herself incapable of enduring this merriment. The whole odious nature of her moral situation had just been rendered palpable to her by a petty, insignificant fact, that of her son making a plaything of the letter in which her lover made an appointment with her for their first secret meeting. She would have been so glad to have held her home life, the maternal obligations of which she would fulfil to the utmost, distinct from the other, from that life of passion upon which she was entering, carried away by something stronger than her reason, something so obscure to herself and yet so real. Was this distinction, then, altogether impossible, seeing that on the very first day all that she would have wished apart were being blended together? "Go and play with Miette," she said to her son, "I have a slight headache." Miette was the little boy's nurse. A lady's maid, a cook, and a man-servant completed the _personnel_ of the household. Miette, who had come from the country with her employers, had taken care of Henry from his earliest infancy. At night, to send him to sleep, she used to sing canticles to him, one especially of which delighted and terrified him: "Come, divine Messiah." "What is Messiah?" he would ask his nurse. "He is Antichrist," she used to reply. "When will He come?" asked the child. "At the end of the world." "In how many years?" "Seven," said the nurse. "Then I shall be twelve years old," Henry would calculate. This astonishing prediction had so struck him the night before, that at the mere mention of his nurse's name, he began to tell it to his mother. At any other time this confidence would have amused her, but while speaking he had in his bright grey eyes a look that the young woman knew only too well. "Don't be frightened," she said, "for you are good, and go and play." The little boy cast a glance at the fire where the black residue alone marked the site of the burnt convent; at the chairs whose backs were no longer the walls of a deep tunnel; at his mother, to know whether he might not remain. Unconsciously he was affected by the sadness overspreading her face. By one of those almost animal intuitions peculiar to extremely sensitive children, he discerned that his presence was vexing to his mother. He kissed her hand, and then suddenly burst into tears. "What is the matter, my angel, what is the matter?" said Helen, pressing him in her arms and covering him with kisses. "I thought you were angry with me," he said. Then, warmed by her caresses, he said: "I am going, mamma; I will be good."