"Believe me, let us be frank with each other. You do not know me well. You have travelled so much. I astonish you. You will see that I have great faults. I am proud and selfish, hardly capable of making sacrifices; something of a flirt, but I have no roundabout ways. Lately, when I was looking forward to your arrival, I promised myself a lasting joy, the joy of having your youth near mine to understand it. I will tell you all that is important in my life, all that I am resolved to do--I have no one here whom I can trust absolutely. You cannot know what I have suffered. Will you?" "Oh yes." "You will tell me your thoughts, but above all I shall have spoken to you. I shall not suffocate, as I have often done in this house. I shall have many things to tell you. It will be some way of regaining the intimacy we have almost lost, and will give us a little tardy fraternal companionship. What are you thinking about?" "About this poor house." Lucienne lifted her eyes above the slate roof which rose in front. She wished to say, "If you knew how sad it really is," then she embraced her brother, and said: "I am not so bad as you think me, brother, nor so ungrateful to mamma. I am going to find her to talk about your return. She certainly wants to speak of her happiness to some one." Lucienne left her brother, turning again to smile at him, and walking as a goddess might, with steps free and finely poised, with her hand replacing the pins which held up her hair so badly, disarranged as it was by the walk and blown about by the wind, she took the fifty steps which separated her from the staircase, and disappeared. CHAPTER IV THE GUARDIANS OF THE HEARTH When Lucienne left Jean he had turned round the house, crossed a semicircular court formed by stables and coach-houses, then a large kitchen-garden surrounded by walls, and opening a private door at the end on the right he found himself in the country, behind the village of Alsheim. His first joy at his return had already lessened and faded. He heard again sentences which had sunk into the depths of his soul; their very accent came back to him with the appearance and the gesture of the one who had uttered them. He thought of the "sad house" there quite close to the wall which enclosed the grounds, and it pained him to remember what an entirely different idea he had formed years ago of the welcome which awaited him at Alsheim, and the almost religious emotion he had felt far away, in the towns and on the roads of Europe and the East, when he thought, "My mother, my father, my sister! My first day at home after my father has said yes!" The first day had begun. It had not been, up to the present, worthy of this old-time dream.