The enemy was in Jack’s own seat, and the child was so overwhelmed by his disappointment that he with difficulty restrained his tears. There was a moment of restraint and discomfort felt by all three. Just then the door was thrown open, and dinner announced by Augustin. The dinner was long and tedious to little Jack. Have you ever felt so entirely out of place that you would have gladly disappeared from off the face of the globe, painfully conscious, withal, that had you so vanished, no one would have missed you? When Jack spoke, no one listened; his questions were unheard and his wants unheeded. The conversation between his mother and D’Argenton was incomprehensible to him, although he saw that his mother blushed more than once, and hastily raised her glass to her lips as if to conceal her rising color. Where were those gay little dinners when Jack sat close at his mother’s side and reigned an absolute king at the table? This recollection came to the boy’s mind just as Madame de Barancy offered a superb pear to D’Argenton.

“That came from our friend at Tours,” said Jack, maliciously.

D’Argenton, who was about to peel the fruit, dropped it upon his plate with a shrug of the shoulders. What an angry glance Ida threw upon her child! She had never looked at him in that way before. Jack did not venture to speak again, and the evening to him was but a dreary continuation of the repast.

Ida and the poet talked in low voices, and in that confidential tone that indicates great intimacy. He told her of his sad childhood and of his early home. He described the ruined towers and the long corridors where the wind raged and howled. He then depicted his early struggles in the great city, the constant obstacles thrown in the way of the development of his genius, of his jealous rivals and literary enemies, and of the terrible epigrams which he had hurled upon them.

“Then I uttered these stinging words.” This time she did not interrupt him, but listened with a smile, and her absorption was so great that when he ceased speaking she still listened, although nothing was to be heard in the salon save the ticking of the clock and the rustling of the leaves of the album that Jack, half asleep, was turning over. Suddenly she rose with a start.

“Come, Jack, my love; call Constant to take you back to school. It is quite time.”

“O, mamma!” said the child, sadly; but he dared not say that he generally remained much later. He did not wish to be troublesome to his mother, nor to meet again such an expression in her ordinarily serene and laughing eyes, as had so startled him at the dinner-table.

She rewarded him for his self-control by a most loving embrace.

“Good night, my child!” said D’Argenton, and he drew the child toward him as if to embrace him, but suddenly, with a movement of repulsion, turned aside as he had done at dinner from the fruit.

“I cannot! I cannot!” he murmured, throwing himself back in his armchair and passing his handkerchief over his forehead.

Jack turned to his mother in amazement.

“Go, dear Jack. Take him away, Constant.” And while Madame de Barancy sought to conciliate her poet, the child returned with a heavy heart to his school; and in the cold dormitory, as he thought of the professor installed in his mother’s chimney-corner, said to himself, “He is very comfortable there. I wonder how long he means to stay!”

In D’Argenton’s exclamation and in his repugnance to Jack, there was certainly some acting, but there was also real feeling. He was very jealous of the child, who represented to him Ida’s past, not that the poet was profoundly in love with the countess. He, on the contrary, loved himself in her, and, Narcissus-like, worshipped his own image which he saw reflected in her clear eyes. But D’Argenton would have preferred to be the first to disturb those depths.

But these regrets were useless, though Ida shared them. “Why did I not know him earlier?” she said to herself over and over again.

“She ought to understand by this time,” said D’Argenton, sulkily, “that I do not wish to see that boy.”

But even for her poet’s sake Ida could not keep her child away from her entirely. She did not, however, go so often to the academy, nor summon Jack from school, as she had done, and this change was by no means the smallest of the sacrifices she was called upon to make.

As to the hotel she occupied, her carriage, and the luxury in which she lived, she was ready to abandon them all at a word from D’Argenton.

“You will see,” she said, “how I can aid you. I can work, and, besides, I shall not be completely penniless.”

But D’Argenton hesitated. He was, notwithstanding his apparent enthusiasm and recklessness, extremely methodical and clear-headed.

“No, we will wait a while. I shall be rich some day, and then—”

He alluded to his old aunt, who now made him an allowance and whose heir he would unquestionably be. “The good old lady was very old,” he added. And the two, Ida and D’Argenton, made a great many plans for the days that were to come. They would live in the country, but not so far away from Paris that they would be deprived of its advantages. They would have a little cottage, over the door of which should be inscribed this legend: Parva domus, magna quies. There he could work, write a book—a novel, and later, a volume of poems.