Then all was silent once more.

Pierre had opened his eyes and was looking about him, startled to find himself here, roused from his nightmare.

“I am mad,” thought he, “I suspect my mother.”  And a surge of love and emotion, of repentance, and prayer, and grief, welled up in his heart.  His mother!  Knowing her as he knew her, how could he ever have suspected her?  Was not the soul, was not the life of this simple-minded, chaste, and loyal woman clearer than water?  Could any one who had seen and known her ever think of her but as above suspicion?  And he, her son, had doubted her!  Oh, if he could but have taken her in his arms at that moment, how he would have kissed and caressed her, and gone on his knees to crave pardon.

Would she have deceived his father—­she?

His father!—­A very worthy man, no doubt, upright and honest in business, but with a mind which had never gone beyond the horizon of his shop.  How was it that this woman, who must have been very pretty—­as he knew, and it could still be seen—­gifted, too, with a delicate, tender emotional soul, could have accepted a man so unlike herself as a suitor and a husband?  Why inquire?  She had married, as young French girls do marry, the youth with a little fortune proposed to her by their relations.  They had settled at once in their shop in the Rue Montmartre; and the young wife, ruling over the desk, inspired by the feeling of a new home, and the subtle and sacred sense of interests in common which fills the place of love, and even of regard, by the domestic hearth of most of the commercial houses of Paris, had set to work, with all her superior and active intelligence, to make the fortune they hoped for.  And so her life had flowed on, uniform, peaceful and respectable, but loveless.

Loveless?—­was it possible then that a woman should not love?  That a young and pretty woman, living in Paris, reading books, applauding actresses for dying of passion on the stage, could live from youth to old age without once feeling her heart touched?  He would not believe it of any one else; why should she be different from all others, though she was his mother?

She had been young, with all the poetic weaknesses which agitate the heart of a young creature.  Shut up, imprisoned in the shop, by the side of a vulgar husband who always talked of trade, she had dreamed of moonlight nights, of voyages, of kisses exchanged in the shades of evening.  And then, one day a man had come in, as lovers do in books, and had talked as they talk.

She had loved him.  Why not?  She was his mother.  What then?  Must a man be blind and stupid to the point of rejecting evidence because it concerns his mother?  But did she give herself to him?  Why yes, since this man had had no other love, since he had remained faithful to her when she was far away and growing old.  Why yes, since he had left all his fortune to his son—­their son!

And Pierre started to his feet, quivering with such rage that he longed to kill some one.  With his arm outstretched, his hand wide open, he wanted to hit, to bruise, to smash, to strangle!  Whom?  Every one; his father, his brother, the dead man, his mother!