"Ah! It cannot be true, you say! You must stop lying, do you hear?" His clenched fists and threatening face, and the violence with which he spoke, made the priest retreat a few steps, while he asked himself anxiously which one of them was laboring under a mistake. Again he asserted: "I never had a child." The other man replied: "And no mistress, either?" The aged priest resolutely uttered one word, a proud admission: "Yes." "And was not this mistress about to give birth to a child when you left her?" Suddenly the anger which had been quelled twenty-five years ago, not quelled, but buried in the heart of the lover, burst through the wall of faith, resignation, and renunciation he had built around it. Almost beside himself, he shouted: "I left her because she was unfaithful to me and was carrying the child of another man; had it not been for this, I should have killed both you and her, sir!" The young man hesitated, taken aback at the sincerity of this outburst. Then he replied in a gentler voice: "Who told you that it was another man's child?" "She told me herself and braved me." Without contesting this assertion the vagabond assumed the indifferent tone of a loafer judging a case: "Well, then, mother made a mistake, that's all!" After his outburst of rage, the priest had succeeded in mastering himself sufficiently to be able to inquire: "And who told you that you were my son?" "My mother, on her deathbed, M'sieur le Curé. And then--this!" And he held the picture under the eyes of the priest. The old man took it from him; and slowly, with a heart bursting with anguish, he compared this stranger with his faded likeness and doubted no longer--it was his son. An awful distress wrung his very soul, a terrible, inexpressible emotion invaded him; it was like the remorse of some ancient crime. He began to understand a little, he guessed the rest. He lived over the brutal scene of the parting. It was to save her life, then, that the wretched and deceitful woman had lied to him, her outraged lover. And he had believed her. And a son of his had been brought into the world and had grown up to be this sordid tramp, who exhaled the very odor of vice as a goat exhales its animal smell. He whispered: "Will you take a little walk with me, so that we can discuss these matters?" The young man sneered: "Why, certainly! Isn't that what I came for?" They walked side by side through the olive grove. The sun had gone down and the coolness of southern twilights spread an invisible cloak over the country. The priest shivered, and raising his eyes with a familiar motion, perceived the trembling gray foliage of the holy tree which had spread its frail shadow over the Son of Man in His great trouble and despondency. A short, despairing prayer rose within him, uttered by his soul's voice, a prayer by which Christians implore the Savior's aid: "O Lord! have mercy on me." Turning to his son he said: "So your mother is dead?"