"Not at all, my dear sir!" M. Raindal protested. "What is essential is that one should love the idea of the subject with which one deals, love love, if it is of love that one is writing.... The warmth of sympathy warms everything.... Our works are like our children. Only those which we do not love as we conceive them are cold and unsatisfying." Slowly he went back to his study, while Boerzell smiled at Thérèse. In the course of their frequent conversations, the young savant had obtained little fragmentary confidences which left him no doubts concerning the worldly indiscretions of the master. On the fourth Sunday, M. Raindal did not come to the drawing-room. He had gone out, ostensibly to visit the director of the Collège, but in reality to go to make sure that his little pupil had not returned to her house without giving him warning. The sight of the closed shutters destroyed his hopes. Nevertheless he rang the bell repeatedly, but no answer came. Yet the first days of May had arrived! When would she come back? He walked slowly along the half-deserted streets. Everything he saw brought him some painful recollection. How often he had passed these places, with his soul and eyes still softened by Mme. Chambannes' sweetness! What a change now? How forsaken he was! To rid himself of such sorrowful thoughts or to oppose them by a physical denial from his own lips, he smiled all the way at the little girls and the little boys in their Sunday clothes, whom their parents lazily dragged by the hand. When the master returned home, Boerzell had not gone yet but was still chatting with Thérèse. Near them, Mme. Raindal was reading a pious book. The master attempted to appear in a merry mood. The recent misfortune of one of his colleagues whose trust had been abused by forgers served him as a pretext to scoff at the learned. After all, what was the value of brute science if it was not animated by the spirit? What would his next work be, for instance, if M. Raindal did not prop it up with general and human considerations? Boerzell agreed completely and by a clever digression he brought the conversation back to the social rôle of love. The master took the bait eagerly. His nerves were voluptuously relaxed by this pleasant contest of dialectics against so subtle an adversary. The night fell before he had ended his discourse. "You will dine with us, won't you, M. Boerzell?" he said, when Brigitte came to light the lamp. He only let the young man go at eleven o'clock, dazed by the contest and so tired that he could only stammer. But this melancholy seized him again as soon as he was alone with his daughter. He hardly said good-night and rushed to his bed as if toward a distraction, an asylum of forgetfulness. The next morning he did not rise until half past eight. There was nothing from Mme. Chambannes in his mail. Peevishly, he was splashing water over his face, when Brigitte suddenly entered. "A telegram for monsieur...."