"Ah!" Madame Angelin was saying, "the poor mother had a presentiment of it, as it were. I saw that she felt very anxious when I told her my own sad story. There is no hope for me; and now death has passed by, and no hope remains for her." Silence ensued once more; then, prompted by some connecting train of thought, she went on: "And your next child will be your eleventh, will it not? Eleven is not a number; you will surely end by having twelve!" As Constance heard those words she shuddered in another fit of that fury which dried up her tears. By glancing sideways she could see that mother of ten children, who was now expecting yet an eleventh child. She found her still young, still fresh, overflowing with joy and health and hope. And she was there, like the goddess of fruitfulness, nigh to the funeral bier at that hour of the supreme rending, when she, Constance, was bowed down by the irretrievable loss of her only child. But Marianne was answering Madame Angelin: "Oh I don't think that at all likely. Why, I'm becoming an old woman. You forget that I am already a grandmother. Here, look at that!" So saying, she waved her hand towards the servant of her daughter-in-law, Charlotte, who, in accordance with the instructions she had received, was now bringing the little Berthe in order that her mother might give her the breast. The servant had remained at the drawing-room door, hesitating, disliking to intrude on all that mourning; but the child good-humoredly waved her fat little fists, and laughed lightly. And Charlotte, hearing her, immediately rose and tripped across the _salon_ to take the little one into a neighboring room. "What a pretty child!" murmured Madame Angelin. "Those little ones are like nosegays; they bring brightness and freshness wherever they come." Constance for her part had been dazzled. All at once, amid the semi-obscurity, starred by the flames of the tapers, amid the deathly atmosphere, which the odor of the roses rendered the more oppressive, that laughing child had set a semblance of budding springtime, the fresh, bright atmosphere of a long promise of life. And it typified the victory of fruitfulness; it was the child's child, it was Marianne reviving in her son's daughter. A grandmother already, and she was only forty-one years old! Marianne had smiled at that thought. But the hatchet-stroke rang out yet more frightfully in Constance's heart. In her case the tree was cut down to its very root, the sole scion had been lopped off, and none would ever sprout again. For yet another moment she remained alone amid that nothingness, in that room where lay her son's remains. Then she made up her mind and passed into the drawing-room, with the air of a frozen spectre. They all rose, kissed her, and shivered as their lips touched her cold cheeks, which her blood was unable to warm. Profound compassion wrung them, so frightful was her calmness. And they sought kind words to say to her, but she curtly stopped them.