He was about to go out when a piece of paper in the scrap-basket caught his attention. At a distance the sharp, prying eyes of the rapacious child unthinkingly deciphered a few words on a fragment of the sheet. He stopped short. . . . These words. . . . His mother's writing! He picked them up, read them feverishly, at random at first, one at a time. These flaming words! . . . As they were torn into bits, the emotion they called up, interrupted in the midst of its flight, was all the more fascinating. . . . He gathered them together, rummaged in the basket for the smallest fragments, took them all and patiently pieced them together. His hands trembled at the secret he had captured by surprise. When he had assembled all the pieces and was able to grasp the poem as a whole, he was completely taken aback. He did not understand it very well, but the wild fervor of this solitary song revealed to him unknown depths of passion and grief that exalted and dismayed him. Was it possible that these stormy cries had come from his mother's breast? . . . No, no, it wasn't possible! He wouldn't have it. He told himself that she had copied them from a book. . . . But from what book? He couldn't ask her. . . . And yet, suppose it wasn't taken from a book . . . ? The tears came, the need of crying out his emotion, his love, a longing to throw himself into his mother's arms, at her feet, to open his heart to her, to read her own . . . And he couldn't do it. . . . When his mother came home at noon for lunch, the boy, who had spent the whole morning reading and copying the torn fragments and had thrust them in an envelope into his breast, said nothing to her. Sitting at his table, he even refrained from rising and turning his head towards her when she entered. The more burning was his desire to know, the stiffer was the constraint that led him to conceal his anxiety under a mask of insensibility. If, after all, these tragic words were not Annette's! Doubt returned to him at the sight of his mother's tranquil face. . . . But the other, the upsetting doubt, persisted all the same. . . . Supposing they were hers? . . . This woman, my mother? . . . Facing her at table, he did not dare look at her. . . . But when her back was turned and she moved about the room, looking for something, carrying a plate, he stared at her eagerly with questioning eyes that asked: "Who are you?" He could not define his troubled, fascinated, uneasy impression. But Annette, full of her new life, noticed nothing. LI