“I have always felt,” said D’Argenton, after leaving her time to finish the letter, “that this boy was bad at heart!”
She made no reply; indeed she hardly heard what he said. She was thinking that her child would go to prison if she could not obtain the money.
He continued, “What a disgrace this is to me!” The mother was still saying to herself, “The money, where shall I get it?”
He determined to prevent her asking him the question he saw on her lips.
“We are not rich enough to do anything!”
“Ah! if you could,” she murmured.
He became very angry. “If I could!” he cried. “I expected that! You know better than any one else how enormous our expenses are here. It is enough that for two years I have supported that boy without paying for the thefts he has committed. Six thousand francs! where shall I find them?”
“I did not think of you,” she answered, slowly.
“Of whom, then?” he questioned, sternly.
With heightened color, and with lips quivering with shame, she uttered a name, expecting from her poet an explosion of wrath.