Mordiane asked: 

“Is it your son that I met under the plane-trees?”

“Yes.  Yes, the second.”

“You have two of them?”

“Three, monsieur; one a year.”

And Duchoux looked full of pride.

The baron was thinking: 

“If they all have the same perfume, their nursery must be a real conservatory.”

He continued: 

“Yes, I would like a nice piece of ground near the sea, on a little solitary strip of beach—­”

Thereupon Duchoux proceeded to explain.  He had ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred, or more, pieces of ground of the kind required, at different prices and suited to different tastes.  He talked just as a fountain flows, smiling, self-satisfied, wagging his bald round head.

And Mordiane was reminded of a little woman, fair-haired, slight, with a somewhat melancholy look, and a tender fashion of murmuring, “My darling,” of which the mere remembrance made the blood stir in his veins.  She had loved him passionately, madly, for three months; then, becoming pregnant in the absence of her husband, who was a governor of a colony, she had run away and concealed herself, distracted with despair and terror, till the birth of the child, which Mordiane carried off one summer’s evening, and which they had not laid eyes on afterwards.

She died of consumption three years later, over there, in the colony of which her husband was governor, and to which she had gone across to join him.  And here, in front of him, was their son, who was saying, in the metallic tones with which he rang out his closing words: 

“This piece of ground, monsieur, is a rare chance—­”

And Mordiane recalled the other voice, light as the touch of a gentle breeze, as it used to murmur: 

“My darling, we shall never part—­”

And he remembered that soft, deep, devoted glance in those eyes of blue, as he watched the round eye, also blue, but vacant, of this ridiculous little man, who, for all that, bore a resemblance to his mother.

Yes, he looked more and more like her every moment—­like her in accent, in movement, in his entire deportment—­he was like her in the way an ape is like a man; but still he was hers; he displayed a thousand external characteristics peculiar to her, though in an unspeakably distorted, irritating, and revolting form.

The baron was galled, haunted as he was all of a sudden by this resemblance, horrible, each instant growing stronger, exasperating, maddening, torturing him like a nightmare, like a weight of remorse.

He stammered out: 

“When can we look at this piece of ground together?”

“Why, to-morrow, if you like.”

“Yes, to-morrow.  At what hour?”

“One o’clock.”

“All right.”

The child he had met in the avenue appeared before the open door, exclaiming: 

“Dada!”

There was no answer.