She remained for a moment with her eyes wide open, full of this apparition, which reminded her of another hour of her life. It seemed to her as if the Emperor, by mingling with the line of carriages, had set the last necessary ray therein, and given a meaning to this triumphal march. Now, it was a glory. All these wheels, all these decorated men, all these women languidly stretched out, disappeared amid the flash and the rumble of the imperial landau. This sensation became so acute and so painful that the young woman experienced an imperious need of escaping from this triumph, from Saccard's cry, which was still ringing in her ears, from the sight of the father and the son slowly walking along, and chatting with their arms linked. She reflected, with her hands on her breast, as if burnt by an internal fire: and it was with a sudden hope of relief and salutary coolness that she leant forward, and said to the coachman: "To the Béraud mansion." The courtyard retained its cloister-like coldness. Renée went round the arcades, made happy by the dampness which fell upon her shoulders. She approached the fountain, green with moss, and polished by wear at the edges; she looked at the lion's head, now half effaced, which, with parted jaws emitted a gush of water by an iron pipe. How many times had she and Christine taken this head between their girlish arms to lean forward to reach the stream of water, the icy flow of which they liked to feel upon their little hands. Then she mounted the great silent staircase; she perceived her father at the end of the suite of spacious rooms; he drew up his tall figure, and silently went deeper into the shade of the old residence, of the haughty solitude in which he had absolutely cloistered himself since his sister's death; and Renée thought of the men of the Bois, of that other old man, Baron Gouraud, who had his flesh rolled about on pillows in the sunlight. She went up higher, she followed the passages, the servants' stairs, she was bound for the nursery. When she reached the top landing she found the key hanging on the usual nail; a large rusty key it was, on which spiders had woven webs. The lock gave a plaintive cry. How sad the nursery was! She felt a pang at her heart of finding it so empty, so grey, so silent. She closed the open door of the abandoned aviary, with the vague idea that it must have been by that door that the joys of her childhood had flown away. In front of the flower-boxes, still full of soil hardened and cracked all over like dry mud, she stopped and broke off a rhododendron stem; this skeleton of a plant, shrivelled and white with dust, was all that remained of their living clumps of verdure. And the matting, the matting itself, faded, gnawed by rats, displayed itself with the melancholy aspect of a shroud which has for years awaited a promised corpse. In one corner amid this mute despair, this silent weeping abandonment, Renée found one of her old dolls; all the