The young officer was yet absent at that period in which Cydalise
returned from Rouen with her brother's child.

The little boy was sleeping peacefully in a cot beside his aunt's bed (it
had been his father's cot thirty years ago) when Francois Lenoble
returned from Cotenoir that night.

It was not till the next day that he saw the child. He had been making
his usual morning's round in the gardens and orchards, when he came into
the salon, and saw the little boy seated near his grandmother's chair,
playing with some dominoes. Something--perhaps the likeness to his dead
son--the boy's black clothes, for Cydalise had contrived to dress him in
decent mourning--struck suddenly on the old man's heart. "Who is that
boy?" he asked, with a strange earnestness.

"Your son Gustave's only child," answered his wife gently,--"his
orphan child."

Francois Lenoble looked at her, and from her to the boy; tried to speak,
but could not; beckoned the child, and then dropped heavily into a chair
and sobbed aloud. Until this moment no one had ever seen him shed a tear
for the son he had put away from his home--and, as it had seemed, from
his heart. Not by one sigh, not by one mournful utterance of the familiar
name, had he betrayed the depth of that wound which he had endured,
silently, obstinately, in all these years.

They suffered him to bemoan his dead son unhindered by stereotyped
consolations. The two women stood by, and pitied him in silence. The
little boy stared wonderingly, and at last crept up to the