Lormerin remained bewildered as at the sight of an apparition.

He stammered: 

“Good-day, mademoiselle”

Then, turning toward the mother: 

“Oh! it is you!”

In fact, it was she, she whom he had known in bygone days, the Lise who had vanished and come back!  In her he found the woman he had won twenty-five years before.  This one was even younger, fresher, more childlike.

He felt a wild desire to open his arms, to clasp her to his heart again, murmuring in her ear: 

“Good-morning, Lison!”

A man-servant announced: 

“Dinner is ready, madame.”

And they proceeded toward the dining-room.

What passed at this dinner?  What did they say to him, and what could he say in reply?  He found himself plunged in one of those strange dreams which border on insanity.  He gazed at the two women with a fixed idea in his mind, a morbid, self-contradictory idea: 

“Which is the real one?”

The mother smiled again repeating over and over: 

“Do you remember?” And it was in the bright eyes of the young girl that he found again his memories of the past.  Twenty times he opened his mouth to say to her:  “Do you remember, Lison?” forgetting this white-haired lady who was looking at him tenderly.

And yet, there were moments when, he no longer felt sure, when he lost his head.  He could see that the woman of to-day was not exactly the woman of long ago.  The other one, the former one, had in her voice, in her glances, in her entire being, something which he did not find again.  And he made prodigious efforts of mind to recall his lady love, to seize again what had escaped from her, what this resuscitated one did not possess.

The baronne said: 

“You have lost your old vivacity, my poor friend.”

He murmured: 

“There are many other things that I have lost!”

But in his heart, touched with emotion, he felt his old love springing to life once more, like an awakened wild beast ready to bite him.

The young girl went on chattering, and every now and then some familiar intonation, some expression of her mother’s, a certain style of speaking and thinking, that resemblance of mind and manner which people acquire by living together, shook Lormerin from head to foot.  All these things penetrated him, making the reopened wound of his passion bleed anew.

He got away early, and took a turn along the boulevard.  But the image of this young girl pursued him, haunted him, quickened his heart, inflamed his blood.  Apart from the two women, he now saw only one, a young one, the old one come back out of the past, and he loved her as he had loved her in bygone years.  He loved her with greater ardor, after an interval of twenty-five years.

He went home to reflect on this strange and terrible thing, and to think what he should do.