That attention from her son, whom she had not been to see for three weeks, and who persisted in expecting her none the less, brought to the mother's eyes a flood of tears which blinded her. One would have said that she had entered a new world. It was so light, so peaceful, so high, that little room which caught the last gleam of daylight on its windows, which was all aflame with the last rays of the sun already sinking below the horizon, and which seemed, like all attic rooms, carved out of a piece of sky, with its bare walls, decorated only by a large portrait, her own; nothing but her own portrait smiling in the place of honor and another in a gilt frame on the table. Yes, in very truth, the humble little lodging, which was still so light when all Paris was becoming dark, produced a supernatural impression upon her, despite the poverty of its scanty furniture, scattered through two rooms, its common chintz coverings, and its mantel adorned with two great bunches of hyacinths, the flowers that are drawn through the streets by cartloads in the morning. What a lovely, brave, dignified life she might have led there with her Andre! And in a moment, with the rapidity of a dream, she placed her bed in one corner, her piano in another, saw herself giving lessons, taking charge of the house, to which she brought her share of enthusiasm and courageous cheerfulness. How could she have failed to understand that that should be the duty, the pride of her widowhood? What blindness, what shameful weakness! A sad mistake, doubtless, but one for which much extenuation might have been found in her easily influenced, affectionate nature, in the adroitness and knavery of her accomplice, who talked constantly of marriage, concealing from her the fact that he was not free himself, and when at last he was obliged to confess, drawing such a picture of the unrelieved gloom of his life, of his despair, of his love, that the poor creature, already so seriously involved in the eyes of the world, incapable of one of those heroic efforts which place one above false situations, had yielded at last, had accepted that twofold existence, at once so brilliant and so wretched, resting everything upon a lie that had lasted ten years. Ten years of intoxicating triumphs and indescribable anxiety, ten years during which she had never sung without the fear of being betrayed between two measures, during which the slightest remark concerning irregular establishments wounded her like an allusion to her own case, during which the expression of her face had gradually assumed that air of gentle humility, of a culprit demanding pardon. Then the certainty of being abandoned at some time had ruined even those borrowed joys, had caused her luxurious surroundings to wither and fade; and what agony, what suffering she had silently undergone, what never-ending humiliations, down to the last and most horrible of all!