then, he was subject to causeless fits of depression, prolonged spells of silence. I did not venture to question him. You take after him in this, my poor André." She continued to speak of his mysterious death: "I wept so much for it," she said, "and I have since thought so much of it. Your father had not an enemy; his life was too upright for that. My conviction is that the assassin reckoned on his taking a large sum of money with him; bear in mind that we do not know what your father had in his note-case. Ah, my André, you little know what I went through. That was the time when I learned who were my true friends." She spoke of M. Termonde, and the proofs of friendship he had given her. I was not angry with her, because she did not understand that she could not say his name at that moment without inflicting a wound upon me. Once set going upon the road of reminiscence, what should check her? Why should she scruple to speak to me of her second marriage and the consolation it had brought her? Of course it was terribly sad for me to listen to these confidences, which formed the cruel counterpart of those contained in my father's letters to my aunt. But, sorrowful as it was to sound the depths of the gulf which had separated those two beloved beings, what was this in comparison with the tragic idea that had assailed me? Throughout the long winter's evening I listened to my mother as she talked to me, with the sweet, blessed certainty that never again could my monstrous suspicions recur to my mind. My father's letters were fully explained; he had been profoundly jealous of his wife, and he had never dared to avow that jealousy. It arose from a moral influence of which the person over whom it was exercised was probably ignorant. No, the gentle creature who related all this past history to me with such frank clear eyes, so sweet a voice, such ingenuousness in the acknowledgment of her mistakes, such evident, all-pervading sincerity, must either have been entirely innocent of the suffering she inflicted, or else she must now be a monster of hypocrisy. At all events, I never thought that of you, O my mother! weak but good woman as you were, capable indeed of passing by pain unnoticed, but quite incapable of wilfully inflicting it, and since that evening my faith in you has never been assailed. No impious doubt crossed my mind from thenceforth, during the night which followed this interview, or the day after, which was that of the funeral, or when my mother had left me.