Since the return of his son to him Monseigneur's days had been full of trouble.

After having banished him from his presence almost immediately upon the death of his wife, and remaining without seeing him for twenty years, lo! he had now come back to him in the plenitude and lustre of youth, the living portrait of the one he had so mourned, with the same delicate grace and beauty.

This long exile, this resentment against a child whose life had cost that of the mother, was also an act of prudence.

He realised it doubly now, and regretted that he had changed his determination of not seeing him again.

Age, twenty years of prayer, his life as clergyman, had not subdued the unregenerate man within him.
It was simply necessary that this son of his, this child of the wife he had so adored, should appear with his laughing blue eyes, to make the blood circulate so rapidly in his veins as if it would burst them, as he seemed to think that the dead had been brought to life again.