Her love-story was over; but the drear routine continued--the thrift, the drudgery, the clandestine journeys to the boy. If, when she saw him next, he felt that she was colder to him, she did not mean to be so. Never had she striven quite so wearily to be tender. It was insensibly that she ceased to recall him as a burden. Had Time's touches been more swift she would have marvelled at the mystery of the thing. But the weight of life was lifted very slowly, and the burden bid fair to be consoling before she realised that the load was less. As the months wore by, and term succeeded term, the boy evoked an interest in the loneliness. Duty no longer took her to him--it was affection; to amuse him now was not a task--their playtime had become her single pleasure. From this child, the woman who had had no childhood, captured gleams of youth--the virgin who was for ever celibate, caught glimpses of maternity. "In the _vacances_, Paul, I'll come and stay at Maison-Verte," she used to say, "and we'll have picnics in the park!" When the _trimestre_ was over and she studied his report, her smile was proud. Once when she went, he rushed to meet her with a prize. "Mademoiselle ma mère, look, look!" he halloed. And the virgin's arms were flung about him and she hugged him like a mother. As a mother she marked his progress, year by year; as a mother, mourning his barren prospects and craving to advance them, she beat her breast that she had made him penniless. It was as a mother that, by parsimonies, protracted and implacable, she garnered the means at last to better his condition. By this time her hair was all grey, and the schoolboy's voice was breaking. On the day that she was strong enough, she meant to confess to him and see his love turn to contempt. But the day when she was strong enough wouldn't come. When he was sixteen she had said: "I shall tell him in a year from now!" When he was seventeen she had wept: "God couldn't mind his loving me for a year more!" "Mademoiselle," he would say--for he was a young man and had dropped the other name--"I don't know why you have been so good to me." And she would answer: "Your mother and I were friends, dearest." Only that. "You work too hard," he would declare, "ever so much too hard; you're always tired. You know, you weren't ambitious enough--that was your great mistake. You shouldn't have gone in for teaching; you ought to have played at concerts--you might have been no end of a swell. Play something to me now, will you? What used my mother to say about your playing?" "She said once that it made her cry for her baby, Paul. What do _you_ think of when I play?" But he was shy of admitting what he thought of, because he thought of noble deeds, and his ideal woman, and of the ecstasy it would be to see his name on the cover of a book--and he was doomed to be a clerk.