When the story was ended, Hautot Junior went on:

‘Now we are to make an arrangement together, according to his wish. Listen, I am well off, he has left me property. I don’t want you to have any complaints—’

But she interrupted him energetically:

‘Oh, Mr. Cæsar, Mr. Cæsar, not to-day. My heart is bleeding—another time, another time. If I accept, listen—it is not for me. No, no, no, I swear it. It is for the boy. Besides, it can be settled on him.’

Then Cæsar, scared, guessed, and stammering:

‘Then—it’s his—the boy?’

‘Yes, of course!’ she said.

And Hautot Junior looked at his brother with a confused, strong, painful emotion.

After a long silence, for she was weeping again, Cæsar, utterly ill at ease, spoke again:

‘Well then, Mademoiselle Donet, I’m going away. When would you like us to speak about it?’

She cried:

‘Oh, no, don’t go away, don’t go away, don’t leave me all alone with Émile. I would die of grief. I have nobody any more, nobody except my little boy. Oh! what wretchedness, what wretchedness, Mr. Cæsar! Here, sit down. You are going to talk to me again. You’ll tell me what he did, down there on the farm, all the week.’

And Cæsar sat down, accustomed to obeying.

She drew up, for herself, another chair near his, before the stove where the food was still simmering, took Émile on her knee, and asked Cæsar a thousand things about his father, intimate things in which you could see, in which he felt, without thinking about it, that she had loved Hautot with all her poor woman’s heart.

And through the natural association of his rather limited ideas, he came back to the accident, and began to recount it with all the same details.

When he said, ‘He had a hole in his stomach you could have put your two fists in’, she uttered a sort of cry, and sobbed, and the tears rained again from her eyes. Then, seized by the contagion, Cæsar began to cry too, and as tears always soften the fibres of the heart, he leaned towards Émile, whose forehead was within reach of his mouth, and kissed him.

The mother, catching her breath, murmured:

‘Poor little fellow, he’s an orphan.’

‘I am too,’ said Cæsar.

But suddenly, the practical instinct of the housewife, accustomed to think of everything, awoke in the young woman.

‘You have maybe eaten nothing since the morning, Mr. Cæsar?’

‘No, mademoiselle.’