The illusion fell of itself. Sylvie, coming back to her place, took up her work and did not speak again. The others were talking around her, but she no longer heard them. They in turn became silent. A sombre hush hovered over them. Suddenly Sylvie cried out. Without words. A long cry. Throwing herself down on the table, she struck her head against it. Hurriedly they removed the needles and the scissors. When her speech came back to her, it was to curse God: she did not believe in Him, but she had to have someone against whom to avenge herself! Her eyes blazed, and she hurled vulgar oaths at him. Exhaustion followed. They carried her to bed. She did not stir again. Annette remained beside her until she was unconscious. Then she went home again, utterly worn out. The streets were pale with early dawn. Marc had not slept. She lay down shivering. But just as she was about to get into bed--it was too much, all she had suffered and had to repress during the last twelve hours!--she ran in her nightgown and bare feet into her son's room and passionately kissed his mouth, his eyes, his ears, his neck, his arms, his hands. "My dear, my dear little boy," she said. "You, you are not going to leave me?" He was very much upset, disturbed, frightened. He wept with her, more for himself than for the others, though he wept for the others too. He realized now what he had lost; he wept over the affection he had never desired. He remembered the evening when he had been ill and Odette had come in to see him. He was stricken with affection and sorrow. But he thought, "I'm still alive anyway!" Annette trembled at the thought of beginning another day like the last. Her strength was not equal to it. But the day that followed did not have the terrifying violence of the previous hours. Human suffering, when it reaches its zenith, must descend again. One dies or becomes used to it. Sylvie had recovered her self-possession. She was livid, with hard lines about her nostrils and lips which later, as they grew fainter, left scars behind. But she was calm, active, busy, with her workers, cutting and sewing her mourning clothes. She gave orders, oversaw things, worked; and her hands, like her expression, were sure and precise. She fitted Annette's dress. Annette was afraid to utter a word that would recall the funeral. But Sylvie spoke of it coldly. She would not leave the details to anyone else. She decided everything. She preserved her unnatural calm to the very end of the ceremony, but with a cold and concentrated rage she had set herself against any religious service. She could not forgive! . . . Till then she had been vaguely sceptical, indifferent, not hostile; and while she laughed at it a little, she had been moved without confessing it on the day when she had seen her beautiful little girl dressed in white for her first communion. . . . Exactly! She had been tricked. . . . That dastardly God! She could never forgive him.