“And there is no possible difficulty in the way?” he asked.  “No lawsuit—­no one to dispute it?”

Maitre Lecanu seemed quite easy.

“No; my Paris correspondent states that everything is quite clear.  M. Jean has only to sign his acceptance.”

“Good.  Then—­then the fortune is quite clear?”

“Perfectly clear.”

“All the necessary formalities have been gone through?”

“All.”

Suddenly the old jeweller had an impulse of shame—­obscure, instinctive, and fleeting; shame of his eagerness to be informed, and he added: 

“You understand that I ask all these questions immediately so as to save my son unpleasant consequences which he might not foresee.  Sometimes there are debts, embarrassing liabilities, what not!  And a legatee finds himself in an inextricable thorn-bush.  After all, I am not the heir—­but I think first of the little ’un.”

They were accustomed to speak of Jean among themselves as the “little one,” though he was much bigger than Pierre.

Suddenly Mme. Roland seemed to wake from a dream, to recall some remote fact, a thing almost forgotten that she had heard long ago, and of which she was not altogether sure.  She inquired doubtingly: 

“Were you not saying that our poor friend Marechal had left his fortune to my little Jean?”

“Yes, madame.”

And she went on simply: 

“I am much pleased to hear it; it proves that he was attached to us.”

Roland had risen.

“And would you wish, my dear sir, that my son should at once sign his acceptance?”

“No—­no, M. Roland.  To-morrow, at my office to-morrow, at two o’clock, if that suits you.”

“Yes, to be sure—­yes, indeed.  I should think so.”

Then Mme. Roland, who had also risen and who was smiling after her tears, went up to the lawyer, and laying her hand on the back of his chair while she looked at him with the pathetic eyes of a grateful mother, she said: 

“And now for that cup of tea, Monsieur Lecanu?”

“Now I will accept it with pleasure, madame.”

The maid, on being summoned, brought in first some dry biscuits in deep tin boxes, those crisp, insipid English cakes which seem to have been made for a parrot’s beak, and soldered into metal cases for a voyage round the world.  Next she fetched some little gray linen doilies, folded square, those tea-napkins which in thrifty families never get washed.  A third time she came in with the sugar-basin and cups; then she departed to heat the water.  They sat waiting.

No one could talk; they had too much to think about and nothing to say.  Mme. Roland alone attempted a few commonplace remarks.  She gave an account of the fishing excursion, and sang the praises of the Pearl and of Mme. Rosemilly.

“Charming, charming!” the lawyer said again and again.

Roland, leaning against the marble mantel-shelf as if it were winter and the fire burning, with his hands in his pockets and his lips puckered for a whistle, could not keep still, tortured by the invincible desire to give vent to his delight.  The two brothers, in two arm-chairs that matched, one on each side of the centre-table, stared in front of them, in similar attitudes full of dissimilar expressions.