She did not wish to feel herself any longer in this bright light, amid this stream of people, seen by all those men who yet did not look at her.  Those days seemed far away, though in reality quite recent, when she had sought and provoked comparison with her daughter.  Who, to-day, among the passers, thought of comparing them?  Only one person had thought of it, perhaps, a little while ago, in the jeweler’s shop.  He?  Oh, what suffering!  Could it be that he was thinking continually of that comparison?  Certainly he could not see them together without thinking of it, and without remembering the time when she herself had entered his house, so fresh, so pretty, so sure of being loved!

“I feel ill,” said she.  “We will take a cab, my child.”

Annette was uneasy.

“What is the matter, mamma?” she asked.

“It is nothing; you know that since your grandmother’s death I often have these moments of weakness.”

CHAPTER V

A WANING MOON

Fixed ideas have the tenacity of incurable maladies.  Once entered in the soul they devour it, leaving it no longer free to think of anything, or to have a taste for the least thing.  Whatever she did, or wherever she was, alone or surrounded by friends, she could no longer rid herself of the thought that had seized her in coming home side by side with her daughter.  Could it be that Olivier, seeing them together almost every day, thought continually of the comparison between them?

Surely he must do it in spite of himself, incessantly, himself haunted by that unforgettable resemblance, accentuated still further by the imitation of tone and gesture they had tried to produce.  Every time he entered she thought of that comparison; she read it in his eyes, guessed it and pondered over it in her heart and in her mind.  Then she was tortured by a desire to hide herself, to disappear, never to show herself again beside her daughter.

She suffered, too, in all ways, not feeling at home any more in her own house.  That pained feeling of dispossession which she had had one evening, when all eyes were fixed on Annette under her portrait, continued, stronger and more exasperating than before.  She reproached herself unceasingly for feeling that yearning need for deliverance, that unspeakable desire to send her daughter away from her, like a troublesome and tenacious guest; and she labored against it with unconscious skill, convinced of the necessity of struggling to retain, in spite of everything, the man she loved.

Unable to hasten Annette’s marriage too urgently, because of their recent mourning, she feared, with a confused yet dominating fear, anything that might defeat that plan; and she sought, almost in spite of herself, to awaken in her daughter’s heart some feeling of tenderness for the Marquis.

All the resourceful diplomacy she had employed so long to hold Olivier now took with her a new form, shrewder, more secret, exerting itself to kindle affection between the young people, and to keep the two men from meeting.