"You have gone back to your kind voice.--Your voice! That was my only joy in you. When you were a little child, at Grandchamp, I used to go into the library to listen to you as you played in the garden under the windows."--He had raised himself to a sitting posture. The dream described by the doctor was beginning.--"You don't see me, nor anyone else. I am looking at you.--You run about, your curly hair floats in the wind--your mother's hair.--She comes to you, along the path, against the yews. The air has colored her cheeks. How lovely she is!--She knows I am there. She smiles at me over our child's head.--Where has she gone?" His eyes had changed their expression. They were fixed on other scenes.--"How tiny she looks in that great bed! She insisted on dressing up. Her pearls sink into the folds in the skin of her neck!--Ah! how she suffers at the thought of death! So young, and that frightful disease!--I am going. You know that if I could stay I would not leave you, Geneviève--tell me that you know it.--I love you! I love you!--They are taking her away.--Look! I do not weep. You can look at me, I shall not betray her.--Geoffroy,--he is weeping. I do not weep. I still have our child. He shall have everything, everything. I have found a way--You sha'n't prevent that! You sha'n't prevent it!" A terrifying vision had suddenly succeeded the pictures among which Landri had recognized--with ever-increasing horror!--the amusements of his childhood, his sick mother, and the minute detail of the pearl necklace about her fleshless neck; that mother's burial--and the rest! The invalid had raised himself in his bed. He was gazing at the young man, with a stupefied expression in his eyes, evidently mingling the altogether confused impression aroused by his presence with the nightmare that had possession of him. "You say that he's my son! You have no right to think that," he groaned, "you don't know--Don't say it--I forbid you to say it!" Then, as the illusion assumed a more definite and more alarming form, he uttered a loud shriek and jumped out of his bed. This outcry was heard through the partition. It reached the ears of the servant and the doctor, both of whom rushed into the chamber at the same moment, just in time to stop the invalid, who had darted toward the window to escape from the voices that he heard. "Leave us alone," said the doctor to Landri, who was so horrorstruck by the scene, that he had not even gone to the assistance of the victim of hallucination. "Joseph and I can take care of him." He pushed the young man into the study, where he remained quarter of an hour, half an hour, completely crushed, as if he himself were in the clutches of a nightmare which paralyzed him with terror. At last the doctor reappeared. His face bore the marks of extraordinary preoccupation.