emotion, the brothers found an infinite charm in being together once more
in the home of their childhood.* It was there that both their father and
mother had died--the father tragically, struck down by an explosion in
his laboratory; the mother piously, like a very saint. It was there, too,
in that same bed, that Guillaume had nursed Pierre, when, after their
mother's death, the latter had nearly died; and it was there now that
Pierre in his turn was nursing Guillaume. All helped to bow them down and
fill them with emotion: the strange circumstances of their meeting, the
frightful catastrophe which had caused them such a shock, the
mysteriousness of the things which remained unexplained between them. And
now that after so long a separation they were tragically brought together
again, they both felt their memory awaking. The old house spoke to them
of their childhood, of their parents dead and gone, of the far-away days
when they had loved and suffered there. Beneath the window lay the
garden, now icy cold, which once, under the sunbeams, had re-echoed with
their play. On the left was the laboratory, the spacious room where their
father had taught them to read. On the right, in the dining-room, they
could picture their mother cutting bread and butter for them, and looking
so gentle with her big, despairing eyes--those of a believer mated to an
infidel. And the feeling that they were now alone in that home, and the
pale, sleepy gleam of the lamp, and the deep silence of the garden and
the house, and the very past itself, all filled them with the softest of
emotion blended with the keenest bitterness.

* See M. Zola's "Lourdes," Day I., Chapter II.

They would have liked to talk and unbosom themselves. But what could they
say to one another? Although their hands remained so tightly clasped, did
not the most impassable of chasms separate them? In any case, they
thought so. Guillaume was convinced that Pierre was a saint, a priest of