Then he was frightened, and thought of flight.

The groan again.  This was the fourth time.  It was strangely miserable and plaintive.  One felt that after that last effort, more mechanical than voluntary, the cry would probably be extinguished.  It was an expiring exclamation, instinctively appealing to the amount of aid held in suspense in space.  It was some muttering of agony, addressed to a possible Providence.

The child approached in the direction from whence the sound came.

Still he saw nothing.

He advanced again, watchfully.

The complaint continued.  Inarticulate and confused as it was, it had become clear—­almost vibrating.  The child was near the voice; but where was it?

He was close to a complaint.  The trembling of a cry passed by his side into space.  A human moan floated away into the darkness.  This was what he had met.  Such at least was his impression, dim as the dense mist in which he was lost.

Whilst he hesitated between an instinct which urged him to fly and an instinct which commanded him to remain, he perceived in the snow at his feet, a few steps before him, a sort of undulation of the dimensions of a human body—­a little eminence, low, long, and narrow, like the mould over a grave—­a sepulchre in a white churchyard.

At the same time the voice cried out.  It was from beneath the undulation that it proceeded.  The child bent down, crouching before the undulation, and with both his hands began to clear it away.

Beneath the snow which he removed a form grew under his hands; and suddenly in the hollow he had made there appeared a pale face.

The cry had not proceeded from that face.  Its eyes were shut, and the mouth open but full of snow.

It remained motionless; it stirred not under the hands of the child.  The child, whose fingers were numbed with frost, shuddered when he touched its coldness.  It was that of a woman.  Her dishevelled hair was mingled with the snow.  The woman was dead.

Again the child set himself to sweep away the snow.  The neck of the dead woman appeared; then her shoulders, clothed in rags.  Suddenly he felt something move feebly under his touch.  It was something small that was buried, and which stirred.  The child swiftly cleared away the snow, discovering a wretched little body—­thin, wan with cold, still alive, lying naked on the dead woman’s naked breast.

It was a little girl.

It had been swaddled up, but in rags so scanty that in its struggles it had freed itself from its tatters.  Under it its attenuated limbs, and above it its breath, had somewhat melted the snow.  A nurse would have said that it was five or six months old, but perhaps it might be a year, for growth, in poverty, suffers heart-breaking reductions which sometimes even produce rachitis.  When its face was exposed to the air it gave a cry, the continuation of its sobs of distress.  For the mother not to have heard that sob, proved her irrevocably dead.