flock to your recollection at the sound of that gasping, breathing, while
big hot tears fall slowly from your eyes. Poor wee man. Your hand seeks
his little legs, and you dare not touch his chest, which you have kissed
so often, for fear of encountering that ghastly leanness which you
foresee, but the contact of which would make you break out in sobs.
And then, at a certain moment, while the sunlight was flooding the room,
you heard a deeper moan, resembling a cry. You darted forward; his face
was contracted, and he looked toward you with eyes that no longer saw.
And then all was calm, silent and motionless, while his hollow cheeks
became yellow and transparent as the amber of his necklaces.

The recollection of that moment lasts for a lifetime in the hearts of
those who have loved; and even in old age, when time has softened your
grief, when other joys and other sorrows have filled your days, his dying
bed still appears to you when sitting of an evening beside the fire. You
see amid the sparkling flames the room of the lost child, the table with
the drinks, the bottles, the arsenal of illness, the little garments,
carefully folded, that waited for him so long, his toys abandoned in a
corner. You even see the marks of his little fingers on the wall paper,
and the zigzags he made with his pencil on the door; you see the corner
scribbled over with lines and dates, in which he was measured every
month, you see him playing, running, rushing up in a perspiration to
throw himself into your arms, and, at the same time, you also see him
fixing his glazing eyes on you, or motionless and cold under a white
sheet, wet with holy water.

Does not this recollection recur to you sometimes, Grandma, and do not
you still shed a big tear as you say to yourself: "He would have been
forty now?" Do we not know, dear old lady, whose heart still bleeds,
that at the bottom of your wardrobe, behind your jewels, beside packets