For some moments they clung together without a word. The poor mother was racking her brains for some way of helping her daughter, and Julie was watching the kind look in those tearful eyes. "Perhaps," thought Evariste's mother, "perhaps, if I speak to him, he will be melted. He is good, he is tender-hearted. If politics had not hardened him, if he had not been influenced by the Jacobins, he would never have had these cruel feelings, that terrify me because I cannot understand them." She took Julie's head in her two hands: "Listen, my child. I will speak to Evariste. I will sound him, get him to see you and hear your story. The sight of you might anger him; his first impulse might be to turn against you.... And then, I know him; this costume would offend him; he is uncompromising in everything that touches morals, that shocks the proprieties. _I_ was a bit startled to see my Julie dressed as a man." "Oh! mother, the emigration and the fearful disorders of the kingdom have made these disguises quite a common thing. They are adopted in order to follow a trade, to escape recognition, to get a borrowed passport or a certificate approved. In London I saw young Girey dressed as a girl,--and he made a very pretty girl; you must own, mother, _that_ is a more scandalous disguise than mine." "My poor child, you have no need to justify yourself in my eyes, whether in this or any other thing. I am your mother; for me you will always be blameless. I will speak to Evariste, I will say...." She broke off. She knew what her son was; she felt it in her heart, but she would not believe it, she _would_ not know it. "He is kind-hearted. He will do it for my sake ... for your sake, he will do what I ask him." The two women, weary to the death, fell silent. Julie sank asleep, her head pillowed on the knees where she had rested as a child, while the mother, the rosary between her hands, wept, like another _mater dolorosa_, over the calamities she felt drawing stealthily nearer and nearer in the silence of this day of snow when everything was hushed, footsteps and carriage wheels and the very heaven itself. Suddenly, with a keenness of hearing sharpened by anxiety, she caught the sound of her son's steps on the stairs. "Evariste!" she cried. "Hide"--and she hurried the girl into the bedroom. "How are you to-day, mother dear?" Evariste hung up his hat on its peg, changed his blue coat for a working jacket and sat down before his easel. For some days he had been working at a sketch in charcoal of a Victory laying a wreath on the brow of a dead soldier, who had died for the fatherland. Once the subject would have called out all his enthusiasm, but the Tribunal consumed all his days and absorbed his whole soul, while his hand had lost its knack from disuse and had grown heavy and inert. He hummed over the _Ca ira_. "I hear you singing," said the _citoyenne_ Gamelin; "you are light-hearted, Evariste?"