The next day it was no longer possible to conceal from Lazare his mother's condition. All night long had Pauline listened, constantly awakened from brief dozes, and ever believing that she heard groans ascending through the floor. Then in the morning she fell into so deep a sleep that it was only at nine o'clock she was roused by the slamming of a door. When, after hastily dressing herself, she went downstairs to make inquiries, she encountered Lazare on the landing of the first floor. He had just left his mother's room. The swelling was reaching her stomach, and Véronique had come to the conclusion that the young man must be warned. 'Well?' asked Pauline. At first Lazare, who looked utterly upset, made no reply. Yielding to a habit that had grown upon him, he grasped his chin with his trembling fingers, and when at last he tried to speak he could scarcely stammer: 'It is all over with her!' He went upstairs to his own room with a dazed air. Pauline followed him. When they reached that big room on the second floor, which she had never entered since the day she had surprised Louise there in her cousin's arms, Pauline closed the door and tried to reassure the young man. 'You don't even know what is the matter with her. Wait till the Doctor comes, at any rate, before you begin to alarm yourself. She is very strong, and we may always hope for the best.' But he was possessed by a sudden presentiment, and repeated obstinately: 'It is all over with her; all over.' It was a perfectly unexpected blow, and quite overcame him. When he had risen that morning, he had looked at the sea, as he always did, yawning with boredom and complaining of the idiotic emptiness of life. Then, his mother having shown him her knees, the sight of her poor swollen limbs, puffed out by œdema, huge and pallid, looking already like lifeless trunks, had thrilled him with panic-stricken tenderness. It was always like this. At every moment fresh trouble came. Even now, as he sat upon the edge of his big table, trembling from head to foot, he did not dare to give the name of the disease whose symptoms he had recognised. He had ever been haunted by a dread of heart disease seizing upon himself and his relations, for his two years of medical study had not sufficed to show him that all diseases were liable to lead to death. To be stricken at the heart, at the very source of life, that to him seemed the all-terrible, pitiless cause of death. And it was this death that his mother was going to die, and which he himself would infallibly die also in his own turn! 'Why should you distress yourself in this way?' Pauline asked him. 'Plenty of dropsical people live for a very long time. Don't you remember Madame Simonnot? She died in the end of inflammation of the lungs.'