The mother was also thinking; and these two currents of thoughts moved side by side, perhaps to mingle unawares in the shadowy land of reverie. Meanwhile her eyes, gloomy as the night, rested again on Tellmarch. "We cannot go on like this," she said. "Hush!" rejoined Tellmarch, putting his finger on his lips. She continued,-- "I am angry with you for saving me; you did wrong. I would rather have died, for then I should surely see them and know where they are. They would not see me, but I should be near them. The dead must have power to protect." He took her by the arm, and felt her pulse. "You must calm yourself, or you will have a relapse." She asked him almost harshly,-- "When can I go away?" "Go away?" "Yes. When shall I be fit for tramping?" "Never, if you are unreasonable; to-morrow, if you are good." "What do you call being good?" "Trusting in God." "God? What has He done with my children?" She seemed to be wandering. Her voice had grown very gentle. "You must see," she went on to say, "that I cannot stay like this. You never had any children; but I am a mother: that makes a difference. One cannot judge of a thing unless he knows what it is like. Did you ever have any children?" "No," replied Tellmarch. "But I have. Can I live without my children? I should like to be told why my children are not here. Something is happening, but what it is I cannot understand." "Come," said Tellmarch, "you are feverish again. You mustn't talk any more." She looked at him and was silent. And from that day she kept silence again. This implicit obedience was more than Tellmarch desired. She spent hour after hour crouching at the foot of the old tree, like one stupefied. She pondered in silence,--that refuge of simple souls who have sounded the gloomy depths of woe. She seemed to give up trying to understand. After a certain point despair becomes unintelligible to the despairing. As Tellmarch watched her, his sympathy increased. The sight of her suffering excited in this old man thoughts such as a woman might have known. "She may close her lips," he said to himself, "but her eyes will speak, and I see what ails her. She has but one idea; she cannot be resigned to the thought that she is no longer a mother. Her mind dwells constantly on the image of her youngest, whom she was nursing not long ago. How charming it must be to feel a tiny rosy mouth drawing ones soul from out one's body, feeding its own little life on the life of its mother!" He too was silent, realizing the impotence of speech in the presence of such sorrow. There is something really terrible in the silence of an unchanging thought, and how can one expect that a mother will listen to reason? Maternity sees but one side. It is useless to argue with it. One sublime characteristic of a mother is her resemblance to a wild animal. The maternal instinct is divine animalism. The mother ceases to be a woman; she becomes a female, and her children are her cubs.