"'For I love her, that child whom I have no right to name. I love her! She is good, tender, admirable. If I did not see that she resembled me--for she does resemble me--I should tell thee that she was beautiful. I would be proud to cry aloud: "This is my daughter!" To promenade with her on my arm--and I must hide this secret from all the world. That is my torture! And it is the chastisement of all that has not been right in my life. Ah! sad, unhappy loves!' That same malediction for the past came to his lips as it had come to his thoughts. The old workman, burdened with labor throughout the week, who could promenade on the Boulevard de Clichy on Sunday, with his daughter on his arm, was happier than Rovère. And--a strange thing, sentiment of shame and remorse--feeling himself traveling fast to his last resting-place in the cemetery, he expressed no wish to see that child, to send for her to come from Blois under some pretext or other, easy enough to find. "No, he experienced a fierce desire for solitude, he shrunk from an interview, in which he feared all his grief would rush to his lips in a torrent of words. He feared for himself, for his weakness, for the strange feeling he experienced in his head. "'It seems as if it oscillated upon my shoulders,' he said. 'If Marthe came (and he repeated the name as a child would have pronounced it who was just learning to name the letters of a word) I would give her but the sad spectacle of a broken-down man, and leave on her mind only the impression of a human ruin. And then--and then--not to see her! not to have the right to see her! that is all right--it is my chastisement!' "Let it be so! I understood. I feared that an interview would be mortal. He had been so terribly agitated when he had sent for me that other time. "But I, at least, wished to recall to him his former wish which he had expressed of providing for the girl's future. I desired that he should make up for the past, since money is one of the forms of reparation. But I dared not speak to him again in regard to it, or of that trust of which he had spoken. "He said to me, this strong man whom Death had never frightened, and whom he had braved many times, he said to me now, weakened by this illness which was killing him hour by hour: "If I knew that my end was near I would decide--but I have time."