Roland exclaimed: 

“Why, yes, to be sure; I remember it perfectly.  I saw it again last week.  Your mother found it in her desk when she was tidying the papers.  It was on Thursday or Friday.  Do you remember, Louise?  I was shaving myself when you took it out and laid in on a chair by your side with a pile of letters of which you burned half.  Strange, isn’t it, that you should have come across the portrait only two or three days before Jean heard of his legacy?  If I believed in presentiments I should think that this was one.”

Mme. Roland calmly replied: 

“Yes, I know where it is.  I will fetch it presently.”

Then she had lied!  When she had said that very morning to her son who had asked her what had become of the miniature:  “I don’t exactly know—­perhaps it is in my desk”—­it was a lie!  She had seen it, touched it, handled it, gazed at it but a few days since; and then she had hidden it away again in the secret drawer with those letters—­his letters.

Pierre looked at the mother who had lied to him; looked at her with the concentrated fury of a son who had been cheated, robbed of his most sacred affection, and with the jealous wrath of a man who, after long being blind, at last discovers a disgraceful betrayal.  If he had been that woman’s husband—­and not her child—­he would have gripped her by the wrists, seized her by the shoulders or the hair, have flung her on the ground, have hit her, hurt her, crushed her!  And he might say nothing, do nothing, show nothing, reveal nothing.  He was her son; he had no vengeance to take.  And he had not been deceived.

Nay, but she had deceived his tenderness, his pious respect.  She owed to him to be without reproach, as all mothers owe it to their children.  If the fury that boiled within him verged on hatred it was that he felt her to be even more guilty towards him than toward his father.

The love of man and wife is a voluntary compact in which the one who proves weak is guilty only of perfidy; but when the wife is a mother her duty is a higher one, since nature has intrusted her with a race.  If she fails, then she is cowardly, worthless, infamous.

“I do not care,” said Roland suddenly, stretching out his legs under the table, as he did every evening while he sipped his glass of black-currant brandy.  “You may do worse than live idle when you have a snug little income.  I hope Jean will have us to dinner in style now.  Hang it all!  If I have indigestion now and then I cannot help it.”

Then turning to his wife he added: 

“Go and fetch that portrait, little woman, as you have done your dinner.  I should like to see it again myself.”

She rose, took a taper, and went.  Then, after an absence which Pierre thought long, though she was not away more than three minutes, Mme. Roland returned smiling, and holding an old-fashioned gilt frame by the ring.