“Clapart, two glasses of wine for the postilion and for monsieur!” cried the mother, flinging herself into a chair that she might read the fatal letter.  “Oscar,” she said, staggering towards her bed, “do you want to kill your mother?  After all the cautions I gave you this morning—­”

She did not end her sentence, for she fainted from distress of mind.  When she came to herself she heard her husband saying to Oscar, as he shook him by the arm:—­

“Will you answer me?”

“Go to bed, monsieur,” she said to her son.  “Let him alone, Monsieur Clapart.  Don’t drive him out of his senses; he is frightfully changed.”

Oscar did not hear his mother’s last words; he had slipped away to bed the instant that he got the order.

Those who remember their youth will not be surprised to learn that after a day so filled with events and emotions, Oscar, in spite of the enormity of his offences, slept the sleep of the just.  The next day he did not find the world so changed as he thought it; he was surprised to be very hungry,—­he who the night before had regarded himself as unworthy to live.  He had only suffered mentally.  At his age mental impressions succeed each other so rapidly that the last weakens its predecessor, however deeply the first may have been cut in.  For this reason corporal punishment, though philanthropists are deeply opposed to it in these days, becomes necessary in certain cases for certain children.  It is, moreover, the most natural form of retribution, for Nature herself employs it; she uses pain to impress a lasting memory of her precepts.  If to the shame of the preceding evening, unhappily too transient, the steward had joined some personal chastisement, perhaps the lesson might have been complete.  The discernment with which such punishment needs to be administered is the greatest argument against it.  Nature is never mistaken; but the teacher is, and frequently.

Madame Clapart took pains to send her husband out, so that she might be alone with her son the next morning.  She was in a state to excite pity.  Her eyes, worn with tears; her face, weary with the fatigue of a sleepless night; her feeble voice,—­in short, everything about her proved an excess of suffering she could not have borne a second time, and appealed to sympathy.

When Oscar entered the room she signed to him to sit down beside her, and reminded him in a gentle but grieved voice of the benefits they had so constantly received from the steward of Presles.  She told him that they had lived, especially for the last six years, on the delicate charity of Monsieur Moreau; and that Monsieur Clapart’s salary, also the “demi-bourse,” or scholarship, by which he (Oscar) had obtained an education, was due to the Comte de Serizy.  Most of this would now cease.  Monsieur Clapart, she said, had no claim to a pension,—­his period of service not being long enough to obtain one.  On the day when he was no longer able to keep his place, what would become of them?