“What are you laughing about?”

The boy answered,—­

“I am not laughing.”

Ursus felt a kind of shock, looked at him fixedly for a few minutes, and said,—­

“Then you are frightful.”

The interior of the caravan, on the previous night, had been so dark that Ursus had not yet seen the boy’s face.  The broad daylight revealed it.  He placed the palms of his hands on the two shoulders of the boy, and, examining his countenance more and more piercingly, exclaimed,—­

“Do not laugh any more!”

“I am not laughing,” said the child.

Ursus was seized with a shudder from head to foot.

“You do laugh, I tell you.”

Then seizing the child with a grasp which would have been one of fury had it not been one of pity, he asked him:  roughly,—­

“Who did that to you?”

The child replied,—­

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“How long have you had that laugh?”

“I have always been thus,” said the child.

Ursus turned towards the chest, saying in a low voice,—­

“I thought that work was out of date.”

He took from the top of it, very softly, so as not to awaken the infant, the book which he had placed there for a pillow.

“Let us see Conquest,” he murmured.

It was a bundle of paper in folio, bound in soft parchment.  He turned the pages with his thumb, stopped at a certain one, opened the book wide on the stove, and read,—­

“‘De Denasatis,’ it is here.”

And he continued,—­

“Bucca fissa usque ad aures, genezivis denudatis, nasoque murdridato, masca eris, et ridebis semper.”

“There it is for certain.”

Then he replaced the book on one of the shelves, growling.

“It might not be wholesome to inquire too deeply into a case of the kind.  We will remain on the surface.  Laugh away, my boy!”

Just then the little girl awoke.  Her good-day was a cry.

“Come, nurse, give her the breast,” said Ursus.

The infant sat up.  Ursus taking the phial from the stove gave it to her to suck.

Then the sun arose.  He was level with the horizon.  His red rays gleamed through the glass, and struck against the face of the infant, which was turned towards him.  Her eyeballs, fixed on the sun, reflected his purple orbit like two mirrors.  The eyeballs were immovable, the eyelids also.

“See!” said Ursus.  “She is blind.”

PART II.

BOOK THE FIRST.

THE EVERLASTING PRESENCE OF THE PAST:  MAN REFLECTS MAN.

CHAPTER I.

LORD CLANCHARLIE.

I.

There was, in those days, an old tradition.