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General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1920 Original Publisher: Macaulay Co. Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER IV THE POOR PEOPLE OF SAREK HONORINE'S wound was deep but did not seem likely to prove fatal. When Veroni- que had dressed it and moved Marie Le Goff's body to the room filled with books and furnished like a study in which her father was lying, she closed M. d'Hergemont's eyes, covered him with a sheet and knelt down to pray. But the words of prayer would not come to her lips and her mind was incapable of dwelling on a single thought. She felt stunned by the repeated blows of misfortune. She sat down in a chair, holding her head in her hands. Thus she remained for nearly an hour, whPe Honorine slept a feverish sleep. With all her strength she rejected her son's image, even as she had always rejected Vorski's. But the two images became mingled together, whirling around her and dancing before her eyes like those lights which, when we close our eyelids tightly, pass and pass again and multiply and blend into one. And it was always one and the same face, cruel, sardonic, hideously grinning. She did not suffer, as a mother suffers when mourning the loss of a son. Her son had been dead these fourteen years; and the one who had come to life again, the one for whom all the wells of hermaternal affection were ready to gush forth, had suddenly become a stranger and even worse: Vorski's son! How indeed could she have suffered? But ah, what a wound inflicted in the depths of her being 1 What an upheaval, like those cataclysms which shake the whole of a peaceful countryside ! What a hellish spectacle! What a vision of madness and horror! What an ironical jest, a jest of...