Yes, that was long, long ago, and lo! Madame Olier found anew in her heart the melancholy sensation with which Madame Privat's words had suddenly oppressed her. Must it be that she loved Landri even then, unconsciously? The truth of that confidence was guaranteed both by the character of her who made it and by the chance that led to it. But perhaps it was all a matter of chance. So that Madame Olier did not believe in it altogether. However, she had retained an ineradicable doubt. How often she had wondered whether the young man's mother had really made a misstep, and whether he was in danger of ever hearing of it! She had had a little shiver every time that he had mentioned the name of Jaubourg, by chance, in their conversations; and deeply stirred as she was, all those complex and confused sensations had suddenly reawakened when he had spoken of his proposed visit to Rue de Solferino. She had fancied him at the bedside of a sick man who, in his last moments, would perhaps let a terrible secret escape his lips! Her apprehension had been so great that an impulsive entreaty had followed, most imprudent if the relations between Jaubourg and the late Marquise de Claviers-Grandchamp had really been culpable! "I am mad," she said, rousing herself from the sort of waking dream, which had reproduced with the detail of an hallucination that brief scene, her apartment at Saint-Mihiel, Madame Privat's face, her voice, her very words. "If Monsieur Jaubourg had been Madame de Claviers' lover, he would not have continued to be Monsieur de Claviers' friend after her death. If only my movement and my exclamation did not arouse suspicion in Landri's mind! I should never forgive myself. No. He is so honest, so straightforward. He has too noble a heart to imagine in others the evil that it would be a horror to him to commit. If he will only speak to his father about that possibility of an expedition against a church! He promised. He will speak to him. His father will prevent him from following out that shocking purpose. For my part, I cannot. I love him too well. Mon Dieu! how I love him! how I love him! I defended myself too long. Ah! I feel that I am all his, now!" And as, at that moment, she heard laughter through the partition, announcing little Ludovic's return, she opened the door to call her child, and, pressing him to her heart, she embraced him frantically, to prove to herself that this love to which she was on the point of abandoning herself, by promising to become the wife of a second husband, would take nothing from the son of the first; and she said to him:-- "You know that your mother loves you, you know it, tell me that you know it." II A GRAND SEIGNEUR