The idea of owing you anything is intolerable to me and I think I had rather die of hunger than sit at your table again. Fortunately I seem to remember having heard that my mother was richer than you when she married you. I am free to think, therefore, that the burden of supporting me fell only on her. I thank her—consider her quit of anything else she may owe me—and beg her to forget me. You will have no difficulty in explaining my departure to those it may surprise. I give you free leave to put what blame you choose on me (though I know well enough that you will not wait for my leave to do this).

I sign this letter with that ridiculous name of yours, which I should like to fling back in your face, and which I am longing and hoping soon to dishonour.

BERNARD PROFITENDIEU.

P.S. I am leaving all my things behind me. They belong more legitimately to Caloub—at any rate I hope so, for your sake.

Monsieur Profitendieu totters to an arm-chair. He wants to reflect, but his mind is in a confused whirl. Moreover he feels a little stabbing pain in his right side, just below his ribs. There can be no question about it. It is a liver attack. Would there be any Vichy water in the house? If only his wife had not gone out! How is he to break the news of Bernard’s flight to her? Ought he to show her the letter? It is an unjust letter—abominably unjust. He ought to be angry. But it is not anger he feels—he wishes it were—it is sorrow. He breathes deeply and at each breath exhales an “Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” as swift and low as a sigh. The pain in his side becomes one with his other pain—proves it—localizes it. He feels as if his grief were in his liver. He drops into an arm-chair and re-reads Bernard’s letter. He shrugs his shoulders sadly. Yes, it is a cruel letter—but there is wounded vanity, defiance—bravado in it, too. Not one of his other children—his real children—would have been capable—any more than he would have been capable himself—of writing it. He knows this, for there is nothing in them which he does not recognize only too well in himself. It is true that he has always thought it his duty to blame Bernard for his rawness, his roughness, his unbroken temper, but he realizes that it is for those very things that he loved him as he had never loved any of the others.

In the next room, Cécile, who had come in from her concert, had begun to practise the piano and was obstinately going over and over again the same phrase in a barcarole. At last Albéric Profitendieu could bear it no longer. He opened the drawing-room door a little way and in a plaintive, half supplicating voice, for his liver was beginning to hurt him cruelly (and besides he had always been a little frightened of her):

“Cécile, my dear,” he asked, “would you mind seeing whether there’s any Vichy water in the house and if there isn’t, sending out to get some? and it would be very nice of you to stop playing for a little.”

“Are you ill?”

“No, no, not at all. I’ve just got something that needs thinking over a little before dinner, and your music disturbs me.”

And then a kindly feeling—for he was softened by suffering—made him add:

“That’s a very pretty thing you’re playing. What is it?”

But he went away without waiting for the answer. For that matter, his daughter, who was aware that he knew nothing whatever about music and could not distinguish between “Viens Poupoule” and the “March in Tannhäuser” (at least, so she used to say), had no intention of answering.

But there he was at the door again!

“Has your mother come in?”

“No, not yet.”

Absurd! she would be coming in so late that he would have no time to speak to her before dinner. What could he invent to explain Bernard’s absence? He really couldn’t tell the truth—let the children into the secret of their mother’s temporary lapse.