The sorrow and shame which had seized hold of Maurice when his mistress had made her semi-revelations to him about her dot were as nothing in comparison with the flood of pain that Margaret’s letter now let loose upon him. How could he resist the appeal it made to him: had he not listened to the call of death, merely for an infamous suspicion? At his feet the lake still invited him, offered forgetfulness to him, silence and peace, yet now he did not even see it. The call of his race resounded in his breast, and behold, instead of being feeble, he was gathering all his strength and setting his face against the disaster that had overwhelmed him. The idea of death comes naturally to lovers the moment they conceive a doubt as to the eternity of their love. Now, it was not a question any longer of his happiness. That was an individual matter of which he believed himself to hold control. Losing that, he should think himself justified in not living on any longer, if he judged that best. All his family was concerned with him in this trial. No longer did he belong to himself alone. Whether he wished it or no, he must yield to a dependency, and the isolation that he had created round himself was nothing but chimerical and vain. And as he lost his lover’s eternal illusion of love’s solitude, of love’s unrelatedness to all the rest of the world, he drew comfort as from a reservoir of energy out of that depth of family ties and bonds that imposed themselves on him with such authority and power. His cruellest suffering came from not being able to mourn for his mother freely and alone. He envied those mothers’ sons who could gather round a grave and surrender to their grief, with nothing to throw their thoughts back upon themselves. Had he not had some part in her unlooked-for end? He recalled the fact that the doctor had not given the sick woman up when he had left, that he had hoped for benefit from a regimen of quiet and rest. But how could her frail life have resisted such a storm? And this storm that he had let loose behind him had indeed ravaged and destroyed his home. It was the dispersion--the Marcellaz gone, Hubert exiled, to seek a little honour for his tarnished name; the threat of ruin with the selling of the old estate. Only Margaret and his father, an old man already, were left at home. But why was Margaret not married? Could her fiancé have been so cowardly as to blame her for her brother’s fault? She said nothing of it at all in her letter. She forgot herself in her chronicle of their trials. “My life now is for you and father,” she said simply, without any other allusion to her sacrifice. No one of them had been spared, except the culprit, culling life’s sweetness under these cloudless skies.