Fred at first believed his mother’s stories were all exaggeration, but the facts were there, corroborated by the continued silence of the person concerned.  He knew his mother to be too good wilfully to blacken the character of one whom for years she had hoped would be her daughter-in-law, the only child of her best friend, the early love of her son.  But by degrees he fancied that the love so long living at the bottom of his heart was slowly dying, that it had been extinguished, that nothing remained of it but remembrance, such remembrance as we retain for dead things, a remembrance without hope, whose weight added to the homesickness which with him was increasing every day.

There was no active service to enable him to endure exile.  The heroic period of the war had passed.  Since a treaty of peace had been signed with China, the fleet, which had distinguished itself in so many small engagements and bombardments, had had nothing to do but to mount guard, as it were, along a conquered coast.  All round it in the bay, where it lay at anchor, rose mountains of strange shapes, which seemed to shut it into a kind of prison.  This feeling of nothing to be done—­of nothing likely to be done, worked in Fred’s head like a nightmare.  The only thing he thought of was how he could escape, when could he once more kiss the faded cheeks of his mother, who often, when he slept or lay wakeful during the long hours of the siesta, he saw beside him in tears.  Hers was the only face that he recalled distinctly; to her and to her only were devoted his long reveries when on watch; that time when he formerly composed his love verses, tender or angry, or full of despair.  That was all over!  A sort of mournful resignation had succeeded his bursts of excited feeling, his revolt against his fate.

This was Fred’s state of mind when he received orders to return home—­orders as unexpected as everything seems to be in the life of a naval man.  “I am going back to her!” he cried.  Her was his mother, her was France.  All the rest had disappeared as if into a fog.  Jacqueline was a phantom of the past; so many things had happened since the old times when he had loved her.  He had crossed the Indian Ocean and the China Sea; he had seen long stretches of interminable coast-line; he had beheld misery, and glory, and all the painful scenes that wait on warfare; he had seen pestilence, and death in every shape, and all this had wrought in him a sort of stoicism, the result of long acquaintance with solitude and danger.  He remembered his old love as a flower he had once admired as he passed it, a treacherous flower, with thorns that had wounded him.  There are flowers that are beneficent, and flowers that are poisonous, and the last are sometimes the most beautiful.  They should not be blamed, he thought; it was their nature to be hurtful; but it was well to pass them by and not to gather them.