“Come, my children, sit down. I don’t like to see you standing there as if you were in front of an examiner. I have something very sad to say to you. Bernard has left us and we shall not see him again ... for some time to come. I must now tell you what I at first concealed from you, because I wanted you to love Bernard like a brother; your mother and I loved him like our own child. But he was not our child ... and one of his uncles--a brother of his real mother, who confided him to us on her death bed--came and fetched him away this evening.” A painful silence follows these words and Caloub sniffles. They all wait, expecting him to go on. But he dismisses them with a wave of his hand. “You can go now, my dears. I must speak to your mother.” After they have left the room, Monsieur Profitendieu remains silent for a long time. The hand which Madame Profitendieu had left in his seems like a dead thing; with the other she presses a handkerchief to her eyes. Leaning on the writing table, she turns her head away to cry. Through the sobs which shake her, Monsieur Profitendieu hears her murmur: “Oh, how cruel of you!... Oh! You have turned him out....” A moment ago, he had resolved to speak to her without showing her Bernard’s letter; but at this unjust accusation, he holds it out: “Here! Read this.” “I can’t.” “You _must_ read it.” He has forgotten his pain. He follows her with his eyes all through the letter, line by line. Just now when he was speaking, he could hardly keep back his tears; but now all emotion has left him; he watches his wife. What is she thinking? In the same plaintive voice, broken by the same sobs, she murmurs again: “Oh! why did you tell him?... You shouldn’t have told him.” “But you can see for yourself that I never told him anything. Read his letter more carefully.” “I did read it.... But how did he find out? Who told him then?” So _that_ is what she is thinking! _Those_ are the accents of her grief! This sorrow should bring them together, but, alas! Profitendieu feels obscurely that their thoughts are travelling by divergent ways. And while she laments and accuses and recriminates, he endeavours to bend her unruly spirit and to bring her to a more pious frame of mind. “This is the expiation,” he says.