This time her voice softened, and an expression of infinite tenderness passed over her desolate face.  And Mathieu, in astonishment, divining the new emotion that possessed her, though she did not express it, made haste to rejoin:  “To let him go his way would be the shortest way to kill him, now that you have begun to give him the breast.”

“Is it my fault?” she angrily exclaimed.  “I didn’t want to give it to him; you know what my ideas were.  And I flew into a passion and almost fought Madame Bourdieu when she put him in my arms.  But then how could I hold out?  He cried so dreadfully with hunger, poor little mite, and seemed to suffer so much, that I was weak enough to let him nurse just a little.  I didn’t intend to repeat it, but the next day he cried again, and so I had to continue, worse luck for me!  There was no pity shown me; I’ve been made a hundred times more unhappy than I should have been, for, of course, I shall soon have to get rid of him as I got rid of the others.”

Tears appeared in her eyes.  It was the oft-recurring story of the girl-mother who is prevailed upon to nurse her child for a few days, in the hope that she will grow attached to the babe and be unable to part from it.  The chief object in view is to save the child, because its best nurse is its natural nurse, the mother.  And Norine, instinctively divining the trap set for her, had struggled to escape it, and repeated, sensibly enough, that one ought not to begin such a task when one meant to throw it up in a few days’ time.  As soon as she yielded she was certain to be caught; her egotism was bound to be vanquished by the wave of pity, love, and hope that would sweep through her heart.  The poor, pale, puny infant had weighed but little the first time he took the breast.  But every morning afterwards he had been weighed afresh, and on the wall at the foot of the bed had been hung the diagram indicating the daily difference of weight.  At first Norine had taken little interest in the matter, but as the line gradually ascended, plainly indicating how much the child was profiting, she gave it more and more attention.  All at once, as the result of an indisposition, the line had dipped down; and since then she had always feverishly awaited the weighing, eager to see if the line would once more ascend.  Then, a continuous rise having set in, she laughed with delight.  That little line, which ever ascended, told her that her child was saved, and that all the weight and strength he acquired was derived from her—­from her milk, her blood, her flesh.  She was completing the appointed work; and motherliness, at last awakened within her, was blossoming in a florescence of love.

“If you want to kill him,” continued Mathieu, “you need only take him from your breast.  See how eagerly the poor little fellow is nursing!”