Mordiane had risen up with a longing to escape, to run off, which made his legs tremble.  This “dada” had hit him like a bullet.  It was to him that it was addressed, it was intended for him, this “dada,” smelling of garlic—­this “dada” of the South.

Oh! how sweet had been the perfume exhaled by her, his sweetheart of bygone days!

Duchoux saw him to the door.

“This house is your own?” said the baron.

“Yes, monsieur; I bought it recently.  And I am proud of it.  I am a child of accident, monsieur, and I don’t want to hide it; I am proud of it.  I owe nothing to anyone; I am the son of my own efforts; I owe everything to myself.”

The little boy, who remained on the threshold, kept still exclaiming, though at some distance away from them: 

“Dada!”

Mordiane, shaking with a shivering fit, seized with panic, fled as one flies away from a great danger.

“He is going to guess who I am, to recognize me,” he thought.  “He is going to take me in his arms, and to call out to me, ‘Dada,’ while giving me a kiss perfumed with garlic.”

“To-morrow, monsieur.”

“To-morrow, at one o’clock.”

The landau rolled over the white road.

“Coachman! to the railway-station!”

And he heard two voices, one far away and sweet, the faint, sad voice of the dead, saying:  “My darling,” and the other sonorous, sing-song, frightful, bawling out, “Dada,” just as people bawl out, “Stop him!” when a thief is flying through the street.

Next evening, as he entered the club, the Count d’Etreillis said to him: 

“We have not seen you for the last three days.  Have you been ill?”

“Yes, a little unwell.  I get headaches from time to time.”

OLD AMABLE

PART I

The humid, gray sky seemed to weigh down on the vast brown plain.  The odor of Autumn, the sad odor of bare, moist lands, of fallen leaves, of dead grass, made the stagnant evening air more thick and heavy.  The peasants were still at work, scattered through the fields, waiting for the stroke of the Angelus to call them back to the farm-houses, whose thatched roofs were visible here and there through the branches of the leafless trees which protected the apple-gardens against the wind.

At the side of the road, on a heap of clothes, a very small male child seated with its legs apart, was playing with a potato, which he now and then let fall on his dress, while five women bent down with their rumps in the air, were picking sprigs of colza in the adjoining plain.  With a slow continuous movement, all along the great cushions of earth which the plow had just turned up, they drove in sharp wooden stakes, and then cast at once into the hole so formed the plant, already a little withered, which sank on the side; then they covered over the root, and went on with their work.