was to say to myself, I will have my son to myself. He shall feel my
influence alone. I saw you set out this morning--set out to insult me
once more, to sacrifice me once more! If you had been truly repentant
would you have offered me that last affront? And when you returned--when
they informed me that you had a broken arm--I wished to tell the little
one myself that you were ill.... I saw how much he loved you,
I discovered what a place you already occupied in his heart, and I
comprehended that, even if the law gave him to me, as I know it would,
his childhood would be like yours, his youth like your youth."

"Then," she went on, with an accent in which emotion struggled through
her pride, "I did not feel justified in destroying the respect so deep,
the love so true, he bears you, and I have come to say to you: You have
wronged me greatly. You have killed within me something that will never
come to life again. I feel that for years I shall carry a weight on my
mind and on my heart at the thought that you could have betrayed me as
you have. But I feel that for our boy this separation on which I had
resolved is too perilous. I feel that I shall find in the certainty of
avoiding a moral danger for him the strength to continue a common
existence, and I will continue it. But human nature is human nature,
and that strength I can have only on one condition."

"And that is?" asked Boleslas. Maud's speech, for it was a speech
carefully reflected upon, every phrase of which had been weighed by that
scrupulous conscience, contrasted strongly in its lucid reasoning with
the state of nervous excitement in which he had lived for several days.
He had been more pained by it than he would have been by passionate
reproaches. At the same time he had been moved by the reference to his
son's love for him, and he felt that if he did not become reconciled with
Maud at that moment his future domestic life would be ended. There was a