Several voices at once explain to me that it is “double congestion, and her heart as well.”  She was attacked by a dizziness, by prolonged and terrible shivering.  She wandered, mentioned me, then suddenly collapsed.  The doctor has no hope but is coming back.  The Reverend Father Piot was here at five.

Silence hovers.  A woman puts a log in the fire, in the center of the dazzling cluster of snarling flames, whose light throws the room into total agitation.

* * * * * *

For a long time I look upon that face, where ugliness and goodness are mingled in such a heartrending way.  My eyes seek those already almost shut, whose light is hardening.  Something of darkness, an internal shadow which is of herself, overspreads and disfigures her.  One may see now how outworn she was, how miraculously she still held on.

This tortured and condemned woman is all that has looked after me for twenty years.  For twenty years she took my hand before she took my arm.  She always prevented me from understanding that I was an orphan.  Delicate and small as I was for so long, she was taller and stronger and better than I!  And at this moment, which shows me the past again in one glance, I remember that she beautified the affairs of my childhood like an old magician; and my head goes lower as I think of her untiring admiration for me.  How she did love me!  And she must love me still, confusedly, if some glimmering light yet lasts in the depths of her.  What will become of me—­all alone?

She was so sensitive, and so restless!  A hundred details of her vivacity come to life again in my eyes.  Stupidly, I contemplate the poker, the tongs, the big spoon—­all the things she used to flourish as she chattered.  There they are—­fallen, paralyzed, mute!

As in a dream I go back to the times when she talked and shouted, to days of youth, to days of spring and of springtime dresses; and all the while my gaze, piercing that gay and airy vision, settles on the dark stain of the hand that lies there like the shadow of a hand, on the sheet.

My eyes are jumbling things together.  I see our garden in the first fine days of the year; our garden—­it is behind that wall—­so narrow is it that the reflected sunshine from our two windows dapples the whole of it; so small that it only holds some pot-encaged plants, except for the three currant bushes which have always been there.  In the scarves of the sun rays a bird—­a robin—­is hopping on the twigs like a rag jewel.  All dusty in the sunshine our red hound, Mirliton, is warming himself.  So gaunt is he you feel sure he must be a fast runner.  Certainly he runs after glimpsed rabbits on Sundays in the country, but he never caught any.  He never caught anything but fleas.  When I lag behind because of my littleness my aunt turns round, on the edge of the footpath, and holds out her arms, and I run to her, and she stoops as I come and calls me by my name.