The child took the infant in his arms.  The stiffened body of the mother was a fearful sight; a spectral light proceeded from her face.  The mouth, apart and without breath, seemed to form in the indistinct language of shadows her answer to the questions put to the dead by the invisible.  The ghastly reflection of the icy plains was on that countenance.  There was the youthful forehead under the brown hair, the almost indignant knitting of the eyebrows, the pinched nostrils, the closed eyelids, the lashes glued together by the rime, and from the corners of the eyes to the corners of the mouth a deep channel of tears.  The snow lighted up the corpse.  Winter and the tomb are not adverse.  The corpse is the icicle of man.  The nakedness of her breasts was pathetic.  They had fulfilled their purpose.  On them was a sublime blight of the life infused into one being by another from whom life has fled, and maternal majesty was there instead of virginal purity.  At the point of one of the nipples was a white pearl.  It was a drop of milk frozen.

Let us explain at once.  On the plains over which the deserted boy was passing in his turn a beggar woman, nursing her infant and searching for a refuge, had lost her way a few hours before.  Benumbed with cold she had sunk under the tempest, and could not rise again.  The falling snow had covered her.  So long as she was able she had clasped her little girl to her bosom, and thus died.

The infant had tried to suck the marble breast.  Blind trust, inspired by nature, for it seems that it is possible for a woman to suckle her child even after her last sigh.

But the lips of the infant had been unable to find the breast, where the drop of milk, stolen by death, had frozen, whilst under the snow the child, more accustomed to the cradle than the tomb, had wailed.

The deserted child had heard the cry of the dying child.

He disinterred it.

He took it in his arms.

When she felt herself in his arms she ceased crying.  The faces of the two children touched each other, and the purple lips of the infant sought the cheek of the boy, as it had been a breast.  The little girl had nearly reached the moment when the congealed blood stops the action of the heart.  Her mother had touched her with the chill of her own death—­a corpse communicates death; its numbness is infectious.  Her feet, hands, arms, knees, seemed paralyzed by cold.  The boy felt the terrible chill.  He had on him a garment dry and warm—­his pilot jacket.  He placed the infant on the breast of the corpse, took off his jacket, wrapped the infant in it, took it up again in his arms, and now, almost naked, under the blast of the north wind which covered him with eddies of snow-flakes, carrying the infant, he pursued his journey.

The little one having succeeded in finding the boy’s cheek, again applied her lips to it, and, soothed by the warmth, she slept.  First kiss of those two souls in the darkness.