And at twilight of the second day, when the work was finished, the workmen gone, silence returned, they found themselves once more sitting at their table, the mother and the daughter, bewildered at seeing so clearly, at having need no longer of the lamp to begin their evening meal. Like a formal visit from familiar days gone by, they contemplated the rose bushes of their court spread out once more against the sky. But instead of the joy they had looked forward to there was at first an indefinable uneasiness: too much light all at once in their little salon, a sort of melancholy splendor, and the feeling of an unaccustomed void out of doors, of limitless change. No words there came to them in presence of the accomplishment of their dream; rapt, the one and the other, held by an ever-increasing melancholy, they remained there without talking, without touching the waiting meal. And little by little, their two hearts pressing still closer, that grew to be a kind of grief, like one of those regrets, dull and without hope, which the dead leave us. When the mother, at length, perceived that the eyes of her daughter began to grow faded with crying, divining the unexpressed thoughts which must so perfectly resemble her own: "It can be built up again," she says. "It seems to me they can try, can they not, to make it the same again?" "I, too, thought of that," replied the daughter. "But no, don't you see: _it would never be the same_!" Mon Dieu! was it possible that such a thing could be; it was she, the very same, who had decreed it, the annihilation of that background of a familiar picture, below which, during one springtime, she had seen in high relief a certain fine face of a young man, and during so many winters the venerable profile of an old aunt dead. And all at once, at recollection of that vague design in the form of the shadow of a bird, traced there by patient gutters, and which she would see again never, never, never, her heart was suddenly torn in a manner most pitiable; she wept the most melancholy tears of her life before the irreparable destruction of that wall. THE ANCESTOR BY CHARLES JOSEPH PAUL BOURGET [Illustration] _Paul Bourget presents the greatest possible contrast to Anatole France. His style is involved, sentence is fitted into sentence, clothed like Henry James, and altogether un-French. Bourget's psychology, though penetrating, seems rather to clothe his characters than to create them, consequently his novels are long psychological treatises. It was a delight, therefore, to come upon this tale of Bourget's, in which the story is as absorbing as the psychology._ _Bourget was born at Amiens in 1852, and began his literary career, as usual, by writing verses, etc. Besides "Outre Mer," which he published in 1891 after his visit to America, his work consists chiefly of novels, "Mensonges," "Crime d'Amour," "Le Disciple," "Cosmopolis," etc. He was elected a member of the French Academy in 1894._ [Illustration]