"Who knows?" sighs Dobe, looking at their little laughing Dvorehle. "Who knows?" Ginzburg understands the meaning of her question and is silent, because he is afraid to say anything in reply. It seems to me that parents who have buried their first-born can never be really happy again. So Dvorehle's first birthday was allowed to pass as it were unnoticed. When it came to her second, it was nearly the same thing, only Dobe said, "Ginzburg, when our daughter is three years old, then we will have great rejoicings!" They waited for the day with trembling hearts. Their child's third year was full of terror for them, because their eldest-born had died in her third year, and they felt as though it must be the most dangerous one for their second child. A dreadful conviction began to haunt them both, only they were afraid to confess it one to the other. This conviction, this fixed idea of theirs, was that when Dvorehle reached the age of their eldest child when it died, Death would once more call their household to mind. Dvorehle grew to be two years and eight months old. O it was a terrible time! And--and the child fell ill, with inflammation of the lungs, just like the other one. O pictures that arose and stood before the parents! O terror, O calamity! They were free-thinkers, the Ginzburgs, and if any one had told them that they were not free from what they called superstition, that the belief in a Higher Power beyond our understanding still had a root in their being, if you had spoken thus to Ginzburg or to his wife, they would have laughed at you, both of them, out of the depths of a full heart and with laughter more serious than many another's words. But what happened now is wonderful to tell. Dobe, sitting by the sick child's cot, began to speak, gravely, and as in a dream: "Who knows? Who knows? Perhaps? Perhaps?" She did not conclude. "Perhaps what?" asked Ginzburg, impatiently. "Why should it come like this?" Dobe went on. "The same time, the same sickness?" "A simple blind coincidence of circumstances," replied her husband. "But so exactly--one like the other, as if somebody had made it happen on purpose." Ginzburg understood his wife's meaning, and answered short and sharp: "Dobe, don't talk nonsense." Meanwhile Dvorehle's illness developed, and the day came on which the doctor said that a crisis would occur within twenty-four hours. What this meant to the Ginzburgs would be difficult to describe, but each of them determined privately not to survive the loss of their second child. They sat beside it, not lifting their eyes from its face. They were pale and dazed with grief and sleepless nights, their hearts half-dead within them, they shed no tears, they were so much more dead than alive themselves, and the child's flame of life flickered and dwindled, flickered and dwindled.