n be over."

"Already, I am so comfortable inside you."

How all this stays in your heart. It is perhaps silly to relate these
little joys, but how sweet it is to recall them.

We reached home as muddy as two water-dogs and we were well scolded.
But when evening had come and Baby was in bed and I went to kiss him and
tickle him a little, as was our custom, he put his two little arms round
my neck and whispered: "When it rains we will go again, eh?"

CHAPTER XXXII. HE WOULD HAVE BEEN FORTY NOW

When you have seen your child born, have watched his first steps in
life, have noted him smile and weep, have heard him call you papa as
he stretches out his little arms to you, you think that you have become
acquainted with all the joys of paternity, and, as though satiated with
these daily joys that are under your hand, you already begin to picture
those of the morrow. You rush ahead, and explore the future; you are
impatient, and gulp down present happiness in long draughts, instead of
tasting it drop by drop. But Baby's illness suffices to restore you to
reason.

To realize the strength of the ties that bind you to him, it is
necessary to have feared to see them broken; to know that a river is
deep, you must have been on the point of drowning in it.

Recall the morning when, on drawing aside the curtain of his bed, you
saw on the pillow his little face, pale and thin. His sunken eyes,
surrounded by a bluish circle, were half closed. You met his glance,
which seemed to come through a veil; he saw you, without smiling at you.
You said, "Good morning," and he did not answer. His face only expressed
dejection and weakness, it was no longer that of your child. He gave
a kind of sigh, and his heavy eyelids drooped. You took his hands,
elongated, transparent, and with colorless nails; they were warm and
moist. You kissed them, those poor little hands, but there was no
responsive thrill to the contact of your lips. Then you turned round,
and saw your wife weeping behind you. It was at that moment when you
felt yourself shudder from head to foot, and that the idea of a possible
woe seized on you, never more to leave you. Every moment you kept going
back to the bed and raising the curtains again, hoping perhaps that you
had not seen aright, or that a miracle had taken place; but you withdrew
quickly, with a lump in your throat. And yet you strove to smile,
to make him smile himself; you sought to arouse in him the wish for