Suddenly everybody got up, and he hastened to rise too, finding himself out of breath and quite unsteady on his feet.
On the terrace the philosopher, after lighting a cigar, slipped his hand condescendingly under his "dear young friend's" arm.

Renouard regarded him now with the profoundest mistrust.

But the great man seemed really to have a liking for his young friend--one of those mysterious sympathies, disregarding the differences of age and position, which in this case might have been explained by the failure of philosophy to meet a very real worry of a practical kind.
After a turn or two and some casual talk the professor said suddenly: "My late son was in your school--do you know?
I can imagine that had he lived and you had ever met you would have understood each other.

He too was inclined to action." He sighed, then, shaking off the mournful thought and with a nod at the dusky part of the terrace where the dress of his daughter made a luminous stain: "I really wish you would drop in that quarter a few sensible, discouraging words." Renouard disengaged himself from that most perfidious of men under the pretence of astonishment, and stepping back a pace-- "Surely you are making fun of me, Professor Moorsom," he said with a low laugh, which was really a sound of rage.
"My dear young friend! It's no subject for jokes, to me.

.