She becomes composed. I take her hand. In a weak voice she calls some memories up--this and that--and "one morning----" She applies herself to it and counts them. I speak, too, gently. We question each other. "Do you remember?"--"Oh, yes." And when some more precise and intimate detail prompts the question we only reply, "A little." Our separation and the great happenings past which the world has whirled have made the past recoil and shaped a deep ditch. Nothing has changed; but when we look we see. Once, after we had recalled to each other an enchanted summer evening, I said, "We loved each other," and she answered, "I remember." I call her by her name, in a low voice, so as to draw her out of the dumbness into which she is falling. She listens to me, and then says, placidly, despairingly, "'_Marie_,'--you used to say it like that. I can't realize that I had the same name." A few moments later, as we talked of something else, she said to me at last, "Ah, that day we had dreams of travel, about our plans--_you were there_, sitting by my side." In those former times we lived. Now we hardly live any more, since we have lived. They who we were are dead, for we are here. Her glances come to me, but they do not join again the two surviving voids that we are; her look does not wipe out our widowhood, nor change anything. And I, I am too imbued with clear-sighted simplicity and truth to answer "no" when it is "yes." In this moment by my side Marie is like me. The immense mourning of human hearts appears to us. We dare not name it yet; but we dare not let it not appear in all that we say. * * * * * * Then we see a woman, climbing the footpath and coming nearer to us. It is Marthe, grown up, full-blown. She says a few words to us and then goes away, smiling. She smiles, she who plays a part in our drama. The likeness which formerly haunted me now haunts Marie, too--both of us, side by side, and without saying it, harbored the same thought, to see that child growing up and showing what Marie was. Marie confesses all, all at once, "I was only my youth and my beauty, like all women. And _there_ go my youth and beauty--Marthe! Then, I----?" In anguish she goes on, "I'm not old yet, since I'm only thirty-five, but I've aged very quickly; I've some white hairs that you can see, close to; I'm wrinkled and my eyes have sunk. I'm here, in life, to live, to occupy my time; but I'm nothing more than I am! Of course, I'm still alive, but the future comes to an end before life does. Ah, it's really only youth that has a place in life. All young faces are alike and go from one to the other without ever being deceived. They wipe out and destroy all the rest, and they make the others see themselves as they are, so that they become useless."