So Marechal brought flowers; he, the gentleman, the rich man, the customer, to the humble shop-keeper, the jeweller’s wife.  Had he loved her?  Why should he have made friends with these tradespeople if he had not been in love with the wife?  He was a man of education and fairly refined tastes.  How many a time had he discussed poets and poetry with Pierre.  He did not appreciate these writers from an artistic point of view, but with sympathetic and responsive feeling.  The doctor had often smiled at his emotions which had struck him as rather silly, now he plainly saw that this sentimental soul could never, never have been the friend of his father, who was so matter-of-fact, so narrow, so heavy, to whom the word “Poetry” meant idiocy.

This Marechal then, being young, free, rich, ready for any form of tenderness, went by chance into the shop one day, having perhaps observed its pretty mistress.  He had bought something, had come again, had chatted, more intimately each time, paying by frequent purchases for the right of a seat in the family, of smiling at the young wife and shaking hands with the husband.

And what next—­what next—­good God—­what next?

He had loved and petted the first child, the jeweller’s child, till the second was born; then, till death, he had remained impenetrable; and when his grave was closed, his flesh dust, his name erased from the list of the living, when he himself was quiet and forever gone, having nothing to scheme for, to dread or to hide, he had given his whole fortune to the second child!  Why?

The man had all his wits; he must have understood and foreseen that he might, that he almost infallibly must, give grounds for the supposition that the child was his.  He was casting obloquy on a woman.  How could he have done this if Jean were not his son?

And suddenly a clear and fearful recollection shot through his brain.  Marechal was fair—­fair like Jean.  He now remembered a little miniature portrait he had seen formerly in Paris, on the drawing-room chimney-shelf, and which had since disappeared.  Where was it?  Lost, or hidden away?  Oh, if he could but have it in his hand for one minute!  His mother kept it perhaps in the unconfessed drawer where love-tokens were treasured.

His misery in this thought was so intense that he uttered a groan, one of those brief moans wrung from the breast by a too intolerable pang.  And immediately, as if it had heard him, as if it had understood and answered him, the fog-horn on the pier bellowed out close to him.  Its voice, like that of a fiendish monster, more resonant than thunder—­a savage and appalling roar contrived to drown the clamour of the wind and waves—­spread through the darkness, across the sea, which was invisible under its shroud of fog.  And again, through the mist, far and near, responsive cries went up to the night.  They were terrifying, these calls given forth by the great blind steam-ships.