"The physician, it seems to me, is deceived there. I shall tell you why, my friend. Just now, in coming from the shop, I crossed the garden. I saw Oliver seated under the yoke-elm bower, apparently sunk in mournful revery. His eye was fixed, his face bathed in tears. On seeing me he furtively tried to wipe his eyes. His features revealed mental suffering; it was easy to see that all was not physical in his malady. 'Oliver,' I said, seating myself close beside him, 'the cause of your illness is not the one the doctor gives. You feel some great disappointment, you hide it from us--that is wrong. My husband cares for you like a father, why do you not confide your trouble to him?' He seemed as much pained as surprised at my penetration; the embarrassed answers he gave were not sincere. He attributed his sorrow to the loneliness he felt in being left an orphan, without any relatives." "Such a reply from Oliver surprises me. Has he not often shown by his manner the most touching recognition of our kindnesses toward him? We make him forget, he says, the unhappiness of his orphanhood; we surround him with a family's attention." "No doubt he was hiding the truth from me, my friend. Then I spoke to him of the family he mourned. He eagerly seized upon the topic, as if glad of an avenue of escape from the new questions he feared I would put to him. He gave me many details of his parents. I learned that his furthest memories went back only ten or twelve years, when he was a boy of six or seven. He remembered that his brother Maurice wore the uniform of the French Guards, and came often to see their mother, a poor lace-weaver." "There can no longer be any doubt!" cried Lebrenn, greatly amazed. "And indeed, by dint of much turning about of my early memories, which are greatly confused as I was then only a child, meseems that Sergeant Maurice, whom I saw often at the house as my sister's betrothed, did, in fact, resemble Oliver." "So, my friend, what is there astonishing in the fact that Victoria, finding again, so to speak, Maurice in his younger brother, should yield despite herself to the reawakening of a sentiment which always ruled her so strongly? A strange sentiment, against which Victoria rebels, although in vain, for a thousand reasons, among them the difference in years between herself and Oliver. Victoria, although still young and in the ripeness of her beauty, might be his mother. The slow malady which is gnawing at Oliver's heart has no other cause than a secret and mad love for our sister Victoria." These last words of Charlotte's, recalling to him many circumstances previously insignificant, forced conviction upon Lebrenn. He felt as one crushed, under the weight of the revelation, and presaging its sad consequences, cried, "Charlotte, Charlotte, what sorrows I foresee--if your suspicions are well founded! And what is worse, I believe you speak sooth."