The strange speech threw him back on her; no one shared him with her.  They settled in Calais.  A few days after their arrival she cut her hair short; she hoped that it would touch him to see that as he would not look like her, she tried to look like him—­to be a. boy like him.  She bought a smart new hat, she composed a jaunty costume, new from top to toe, for everything must be altered with the hair.  But when she stood before him, looking like a girl of twenty-five, merry, almost boisterous, he was simply dismayed—­ nay, it was some time before he could altogether comprehend what had happened.  As long as he could remember his mother, her eyes had always looked forth from beneath a crown; more solemn, more beautiful.

“Mother,” he said, “where are you?”

She grew pale and grave, and stammered something about its being more comfortable—­about red hair not looking well when it began to lose its colour—­and went into her room.  There she sat with his hair before her and her own beside it; she wept.

“Mother, where are you?” She might have answered, “Rafael, where are you?”

She went about with him everywhere.  In France two handsome, stylishly dressed people are always certain to be noticed, a thing which she thoroughly appreciated.

During their different expeditions she always spoke French; he begged her to talk Norse at least now and then, but all in vain.

Here, too, they visited every possible and impossible factory.  Unpractical and reserved as she was on ordinary occasions, she could be full of artifice and coquetry whenever she wished to gain access to a steam bakery and particular as she generally was about her toilette, she would come away again sooty and grimy if thereby she could procure for Rafael some insight into mechanics.  She shrank from foul air as from the cholera, yet inhaled sulphuric acid gas as though it had been ozone for his sake.

“Seeing for yourself, Rafael, is the substance, other methods are its shadow;” or “Seeing for yourself, Rafael, is meat and drink, the other is but literature.”

He was not quite of the same opinion:  he thought that Notre Dame de Paris, from which he was daily dragged away, was the richest banquet that he had yet enjoyed, while from the factory of Mayel et fils there issued the most deadly odours.

His reading—­she had encouraged him in it for the sake of the language and had herself helped him; now she was jealous of it and could not be persuaded to get him new books; but he got them nevertheless.

They had been in Calais for several months; he had masters and was beginning to feel himself at home, when there arrived at the pension a widow from one of the colonies, accompanied by her daughter, a girl of thirteen.