The present? The child lifts its eyes and sees its mother. About the round table, under the warm light of the oil lamp, they are sitting together. Evening, after dinner. Marc is studying--supposed to be studying--his lessons for to-morrow; Annette is mending a dress. Neither of them is thinking of what he is doing. They are trusting to their machines, their willing servants. The dream rolls on. Annette follows the current. The child observes her as she dreams. . . . That is a more interesting spectacle than the lessons his lips are repeating. Marc seemed never to have noticed what was going on about him during these years; he could not have explained any of his mother's occupations. Yet nothing had escaped him. Julien's love. Her love for Julien. He had been obscurely aware of it. And a jealousy of which he was not conscious made him rejoice, like a little cannibal who dances about the stake, in the disastrous climax. His mother remained his. His property! Did he care so much about her? He had only appreciated her when someone else had wanted her. He looked at her--those eyes, that mouth, those hands. In the manner of children who lose themselves in a detail as in a world--and they are not always wrong--he studied each of her features. One shadow of an eyelid, the curling of a lip, are mysterious and vast landscapes. They fascinate the mind of the child. His glance hovered like a bee up and down the half-open mouth. . . . The red door. . . . It plunged into the depths, it emerged again. Searching so closely, he forgot what he was looking at, the woman herself. . . . A stupor full of affection. . . . He roused himself to remember (ugh) to-morrow's lesson, a boy he disliked, a bad mark he had hidden from his mother. . . . And then his attention was caught again by the gleam of the lamp in the shadow of the room, by the silence of the chamber amid the rumbling of Paris--that sense of a little island, of a ship at sea, and the expectation of shore, of what he was going to find, what he was going to carry away on the ship that would be full of his treasures, his hopes, the spoils of life he was going to capture. Among these he counted his mother, her beautiful blond hair and her arched eyebrows. . . . The little Viking! How much he suddenly loved her! With the ardor of a lover, but one who had kept the gift of divine ignorance! And at night, lying awake, he listened to her breathing. . . . All this mysterious life troubled him, absorbed him. . . .