Since the Froments had become conquerors, busily founding a little kingdom and building up a substantial fortune in land, the Beauchenes no longer derided them respecting what they had once deemed their extravagant idea in establishing themselves in the country.  Astonished and anticipating now the fullest success, they treated them as well-to-do relatives, and occasionally visited them, delighted with the aspect of that big, bustling farm, so full of life and prosperity.  It was in the course of these visits that Constance renewed her intercourse with her former schoolfellow, Madame Angelin, the Froments’ neighbor.  A great change had come over the Angelins; they had ended by purchasing a little house at the end of the village, where they invariably spent the summer, but their buoyant happiness seemed to have departed.  They had long desired to remain unburdened by children, and now they eagerly longed to have a child, and none came, though Claire, the wife, was as yet but six-and-thirty.  Her husband, the once gay, handsome musketeer, was already turning gray and losing his eyesight—­to such a degree, indeed, that he could scarcely see well enough to continue his profession as a fan-painter.

When Madame Angelin went to Paris she often called on Constance, to whom, before long, she confided all her worries.  She had been in a doctor’s hands for three years, but all to no avail, and now during the last six months she had been consulting a person in the Rue de Miromesnil, a certain Madame Bourdieu, said she.

Constance at first made light of her friend’s statements, and in part declined to believe her.  But when she found herself alone she felt disquieted by what she had heard.  Perhaps she would have treated the matter as mere idle tittle-tattle, if she had not already regretted that she herself had no second child.  On the day when the unhappy Morange had lost his only daughter, and had remained stricken down, utterly alone in life, she had experienced a vague feeling of anguish.  Since that supreme loss the wretched accountant had been living on in a state of imbecile stupefaction, simply discharging his duties in a mechanical sort of way from force of habit.  Scarcely speaking, but showing great gentleness of manner, he lived as one who was stranded, fated to remain forever at Beauchene’s works, where his salary had now risen to eight thousand francs a year.  It was not known what he did with this amount, which was considerable for a man who led such a narrow regular life, free from expenses and fancies outside his home—­that flat which was much too big for him, but which he had, nevertheless, obstinately retained, shutting himself up therein, and leading a most misanthropic life in fierce solitude.

It was his grievous prostration which had at one moment quite upset and affected Constance, so that she had even sobbed with the desolate man—­she whose tears flowed so seldom!  No doubt a thought that she might have had other children than Maurice came back to her in certain bitter hours of unconscious self-examination, when from the depths of her being, in which feelings of motherliness awakened, there rose vague fear, sudden dread, such as she had never known before.