"Then will you not tell me?" I said, caressing her hand. "Yes," she replied, in a voice more agonized than any I had ever heard. Then she closed her large, bright eyes, and, as if afraid to hear her own words, she told me in a whisper something that was very sad. After she had finished we both cried. "Is the child a girl or a boy?" I asked at last. "A girl," she replied tonelessly. "And is it living?" "I don't know." I jumped from my bed and looked at her incredulously. "How is that possible? Don't you know whether your child is living or not?" She stared at me with a stupid, helpless look, and my pity was aroused. "Tell me everything," I pleaded softly: "perhaps it will take a load from your heart." After that she told me everything. How the man had neglected and abandoned her, how she had faced hunger for nine months to keep her baby with her, how she had fallen ill at last, and was compelled to separate from the child in order to save it from starvation. While she told me all this, her tears flowed incessantly, and I stroked her hands. "To whom did you give your baby?" I asked in a low voice. She closed her eyes again as if recollecting something, and said: "In Paris there is a place where one may leave a child without being obliged to tell one's name." "And there?..." She nodded, and leant wearily on the bed. "But you must have been mad--now you can't recognize your child again." "Oh yes," she replied, shaking her head violently, "I can recognize it again; each of the children receives a ring of thin metal round its wrists, and on the ring there is a number." I was silent, and we went down because the bell had rung for supper. We both ate very little, and when the hymn was sung later, I heard nothing but the soft, melancholy note that trembled in the girl's voice. During the whole evening we said no more about the matter. I busied myself with packing up, and went to bed very late. For a long while, however, I could not go to sleep. Several times I sat up in my bed and glanced at my friend. She was lying quite still, and I believe she was asleep. At last my eyes closed too, and half awake and half asleep, I imagined that I saw a little girl who played in a dingy yard; she had the same large, bright eyes, and the same mass of auburn hair as my friend, only round its wrist there shone a small ring of metal, and on the ring a number was hanging. Chapter XVII