Pierre, as he went towards his mother, looked at her with a sudden sense of never having seen her before.  She held up her face, he kissed each cheek, and then sat down in a low chair.

“It was last evening that you decided on this excursion?” she asked.

“Yes, last evening.”

“Will you return to dinner?”

“I do not know.  At any rate do not wait for me.”

He looked at her with stupefied curiosity.  This woman was his mother!  All those features, seen daily from childhood, from the time when his eye could first distinguish things, that smile, that voice—­so well known, so familiar—­abruptly struck him as new, different from what they had always been to him hitherto.  He understood now that, loving her, he had never looked at her.  All the same it was very really she, and he knew every little detail of her face; still, it was the first time he clearly identified them all.  His anxious attention, scrutinizing her face which he loved, recalled a difference, a physiognomy he had never before discerned.

He rose to go; then, suddenly yielding to the invincible longing to know which had been gnawing at him since yesterday, he said: 

“By the way, I fancy I remember that you used to have, in Paris, a little portrait of Marechal, in the drawing-room.”

She hesitated for a second or two, or at least he fancied she hesitated; then she said: 

“To be sure.”

“What has become of the portrait?”

She might have replied more readily: 

“That portrait—­stay; I don’t exactly know—­perhaps it is in my desk.”

“It would be kind of you to find it.”

“Yes, I will look for it.  What do you want it for?”

“Oh, it is not for myself.  I thought it would be a natural thing to give it to Jean, and that he would be pleased to have it.”

“Yes, you are right; that is a good idea.  I will look for it, as soon as I am up.”

And he went out.

It was a blue day without a breath of wind.  The folks in the streets seemed in good spirits, the merchants going to business, the clerks going to their office, the girls going to their shop.  Some sang as they went, exhilarated by the bright weather.

The passengers were already going on board the Trouville boat; Pierre took a seat aft on a wooden bench.

He asked himself: 

“Now was she uneasy at my asking for the portrait or only surprised?  Has she mislaid it, or has she hidden it?  Does she know where it is, or does she not?  If she had hidden it—­why?”

And his mind, still following up the same line of thought from one deduction to another, came to this conclusion: 

That portrait—­of a friend, of a lover, had remained in the drawing-room in a conspicuous place, till one day when the wife and mother perceived, first of all and before any one else, that it bore a likeness to her son.  Without doubt she had for a long time been on the watch for this resemblance; then, having detected it, having noticed its beginnings, and understanding that any one might, any day, observe it too, she had one evening removed the perilous little picture and had hidden it, not daring to destroy it.