Her aunt, petrified by this, recovered her composure; her long experience as a watcher at sickbeds dispelled Annette's most terrible apprehension, that of diphtheria. Annette retained an unspoken doubt; so did her aunt. One may always be mistaken. And even if it was not diphtheria, there were so many other mortal disorders. Not to know what it was added still more to their fright. But whether or not Annette's heart was frozen with terror, her movements were calm and just what they should have been. Without knowing it, moved by the maternal instinct alone, she did exactly the right thing for the child. (So the doctor told her the next day.) She did not leave him lying on his back for long, she changed his position, she struggled against his fits of suffocation. What neither experience nor science could have taught her the love within her dictated, for she suffered what he suffered. She suffered more. She regarded herself as responsible for it. Responsible! The tension of an ordeal, especially of an illness that strikes a beloved being, often creates a superstitious state of mind in which one needs to accuse oneself for the suffering of the innocent one. Annette not only reproached herself for not having watched over the child, for having been imprudent with him, but she discovered that she had criminal thoughts in the back of her mind: a passing weariness of the child, the shadow of an unconfessed regret that her life should have been swamped in his. Was it quite certain that she had really felt and repressed this regret, this weariness? No doubt, since they emerged at this moment. But who could say whether she had not invented them through this need she felt, when she was powerless to act in a practical way, to act in thought, even if it meant turning her desperate energies against herself? She turned them also against the great Enemy, against the unknown God. As she saw the little swollen face, as she breathed her breath into him, softly raising him in her hands with careful movements, she passionately asked his pardon for having brought him into the world, stolen him away from peace, thrown him into this life a prey to suffering, to mischance, to the evil hazards of heaven knew what blind master! And with her flesh creeping, like an animal at the entrance of his burrow, she growled, she sniffed the approach of the great murderous deities; she prepared to fight with them for her child, she bared her teeth. Like every mother whose child is threatened, she was the eternal Niobe who, in order to turn the mortal shaft against herself, hurls her furious defiance at the Murderer. But no one in Annette's household divined this silent battle.