he can't keep around, he stays in his arm-chair, that's all. In the morning he gardens."
As I took a step forward, she stopped me:
"Wait till I go and prepare him. It might give him a shock to see you suddenly like that."
Josette preceded me, heavy, slow, and limping a little. I crossed the vestibule, then the kitchen where the copper of the stew-pan and "boilers" was shining, and waited in the dining-room. That was the room in which the family was oftenest used to gather, in former days. An old stove of decorated faïence heated it in winter; pictures that I had all my life known, adorned the walls, old-fashioned pictures, contemporaneous with the romances of Louisa Paget, which they somewhat resembled: "The Penitent Brigand and his Son," "The Children of Edward," etc. I thought of the evenings under the lamp, so tranquil and so monotonous; of the silent games of "Goose" that my father sometimes permitted me; of the vanished faces I had seen about that table, now confused in the far depths of the past. The door opened. My father appeared, in a knitted jersey, shod with sabots, an old hat on his head.
"Ha! It is you—"
In old times I was accustomed to his indifferent greeting—he detested demonstration, and there was, moreover, between us, that indefinable something that separates members of the same
