“You are lucky.  But you, dear, remember—­don’t you?—­what a life Maurice led us when his nurse went away.  For three whole nights we were unable to sleep.”

“But just look how your Maurice is playing!” exclaimed Beauchene.  “Yet you’ll be telling me again that he is ill.”

“Oh!  I no longer say that, my friend; he is quite well now.  Besides, I was never anxious; I know that he is very strong.”

A great game of hide-and-seek was going on in the garden, along the paths and even over the flower-beds, among the eight children who were assembled there.  Besides the four of the house—­Blaise, Denis, Ambroise, and Rose—­there were Gaston and Lucie, the two elder children of the Seguins, who had abstained, however, from bringing their other daughter—­little Andree.  Then, too, both Reine and Maurice were present.  And the latter now, indeed, seemed to be all right upon his legs, though his square face with its heavy jaw still remained somewhat pale.  His mother watched him running about, and felt so happy and so vain at the realization of her dream that she became quite amiable even towards these poor relatives the Froments, whose retirement into the country seemed to her like an incomprehensible downfall, which forever thrust them out of her social sphere.

“Ah! well,” resumed Beauchene, “I’ve only one boy, but he’s a sturdy fellow, I warrant it; isn’t he, Mathieu?”

These words had scarcely passed his lips when he must have regretted them.  His eyelids quivered and a little chill came over him as his glance met that of his former designer.  For in the latter’s clear eyes he beheld, as it were, a vision of that other son, Norine’s ill-fated child, who had been cast into the unknown.  Then there came a pause, and amid the shrill cries of the boys and girls playing at hide-and-seek a number of little shadows flitted through the sunlight:  they were the shadows of the poor doomed babes who scarce saw the light before they were carried off from homes and hospitals to be abandoned in corners, and die of cold, and perhaps even of starvation!

Mathieu had been unable to answer a word.  And his emotion increased when he noticed Morange huddled up on a chair, and gazing with blurred, tearful eyes at little Gervais, who was laughingly toddling hither and thither.  Had a vision come to him also?  Had the phantom of his dead wife, shrinking from the duties of motherhood and murdered in a hateful den, risen before him in that sunlit garden, amid all the turbulent mirth of happy, playful children?

“What a pretty girl your daughter Reine is!” said Mathieu, in the hope of drawing the accountant from his haunting remorse.  “Just look at her running about!—­so girlish still, as if she were not almost old enough to be married.”