asked with childish dignity:

"Why did you not tell me this right away when I asked you?"

"You would not have understood me then. You had run your dream of
distress into a blind alley. I had to take the truth along a different
way so as to present it to you anew."

. . . . .

After that they fell silent. For a fraction of time they had come as
close to each other as human beings can come down here below--because of
their august assent to the lofty truth, to the arduous truth (for it is
hard to understand that happiness is at the same time happy and
unhappy). She believed him, however, she, the rebel, she, the
unbeliever, to whom he had given a true heart to touch.

CHAPTER VIII

The window was wide open. In the dusty rays of the sunset I saw three
people with their backs to the long reddish-brown beams of light. An
old man, with a care-worn, exhausted appearance and a face furrowed
with wrinkles, seated in the armchair near the window. A tall young
woman with very fair hair and the face of a madonna. And, a little
apart, a woman who was pregnant.

She held her eyes fixed in front of her, seeming to contemplate the
future. She did not enter into the conversation, perhaps because of
her humbler condition, or because her thoughts were bent upon the event
to come. The two others were conversing. The man had a cracked,
uneven voice. A slight feverish tremour sometimes shook his shoulders,
and now and then he gave a sudden involuntary jerk. The fire had died
out of his eyes and his speech had traces of a foreign accent. The
woman sat beside him quietly. She had the fairness and gentle calm of
the northern races, so white and light that the daylight seemed to die
more slowly than elsewhere upon her pale silver face and the abundant
aureole of her hair.

Were they father and daughter or brother and sister? It was plain that
he adored her but that she was not his wife.

With his dimmed eyes he looked at the reflection of the sunlight upon
her.

"Some one is going to be born, and some one is going to die," he said.

The other woman started, while the man's companion cried in a low tone,
bending over him quickly.

"Oh, Philip, don't say that."

He seemed indifferent to the effect he had produced, as though her
protest had not been sincere, or else were in vain.

Perhaps, after all, he was not an old man. His hair seemed to me
scarcely to have begun to turn grey. But he was in the grip