How was she to pass that endless evening, which she was accustomed to pass in conversation with her young friend, while she worked at some little sketch or some fancy-work, and he smoked his cigar, half-reclining lazily on the cushions of the couch? It occurred to her to escape the impending ennui by calling upon a friend in Faubourg Saint-Germain, with whom she sometimes went to the play; but her friend always retired early, and it would be too late when she arrived. It was such a long way, and the cabs moved so slowly! Then, too, she would have to dress, and Thérèse, who lived in slippers, like all artists who work with enthusiasm and cannot bear to be incommoded by their clothes, was very indolent in the matter of arraying herself in visiting costume. Suppose she should put on a veil and a shawl, send for a cab, and drive slowly through the deserted avenues of the Bois de Boulogne? Thérèse had sometimes taken such a drive with Laurent, when the evening heat was so stifling that they sought a breath of fresh air under the trees. Such excursions with anybody else would have compromised her seriously; but Laurent guarded religiously the secret of her confidence, and they both took delight in the unconventionality of those mysterious tête-à-têtes, which concealed no mystery. She remembered them as if they were already far away, and said to herself, sighing at the thought that they would never return: "Those were happy times! They can never come again for him who suffers, or for me who am no longer in ignorance of it." At nine o'clock, she at last attempted to answer Laurent's letter, but a peal of the bell made her heart beat fast. It was he! She rose to tell Catherine to say that she had gone out. Catherine returned: it was only a letter from him. Thérèse had an involuntary thrill of regret that it was not himself. There were only these few words in the letter: "Adieu, Thérèse! you do not love me, and I love you like a child!" These two lines made Thérèse tremble from head to foot. The only passion that she had never striven to extinguish in her heart was maternal love. That wound, although apparently healed, was still bleeding like unsatisfied love. "Like a child!" she repeated, crumpling the letter in her quivering hands. "He loves me like a child! _Mon Dieu_! what does he mean by that? does he know how he hurts me? _Adieu_! My boy had learned to say _adieu_! but he did not say it when they carried him away. I should have heard him! and I shall never hear him again!" Thérèse was overexcited, and, as her emotion seized upon the most painful of pretexts for manifesting itself, she burst into tears. "Did you call me?" said Catherine, entering the room. "_Mon Dieu_! what is the matter? You are weeping as you used to in the old days!" "Nothing, nothing, leave me," replied Thérèse. "If any one comes to see me, say that I have gone to the theatre. I want to be alone. I am ill."