MARY.

Oh, how many they seem!...  They had already run up from the suburbs of the city when I came....  They are going a long way around....

THE OLD MAN.

They will come in spite of all; I see them too....  They are on the march across the meadow lands....  They seem so small you hardly make them out among the grasses....  They look like children playing in the moonlight; and if the girls should see them, they would not understand....  In vain they turn their backs; those yonder draw near with every step they take, and the sorrow has been growing these two hours already.  They cannot hinder it from growing; and they that bear it there no longer can arrest it....  It is their master too, and they must serve it....  It has its end and follows its own road....  It is unwearying and has but one idea....  Needs must they lend their strength.  They are sad, but they come....  They have pity, but they must go forward....

MARY.

The elder smiles no longer, grandfather....

THE STRANGER.

They leave the windows....

MARY.

They kiss their mother....

THE STRANGER.

The elder has caressed the curls of the child without waking him....

MARY.

Oh! the father wants to be kissed too....

THE STRANGER.

And now silence....

MARY.

They come back beside the mother....

THE STRANGER.

And the father follows the great pendulum of the clock with his eyes....

MARY.

You would say they were praying without knowing what they did....

THE STRANGER.

You would say that they were listening to their souls....
          
                                                    [A silence.

MARY.

Grandfather, don’t tell them to-night!...

THE OLD MAN.

You see, you too lose courage....  I knew well that we must not look.  I am nearly eighty-three years old, and this is the first time the sight of life has struck me.  I do not know why everything they do seems so strange and grave to me....  They wait for night quite simply, under their lamp, as we might have been waiting under ours; and yet I seem to see them from the height of another world, because I know a little truth which they do not know yet....  Is it that, my children?  Tell me, then, why you are pale, too?  Is there something else, perhaps, that cannot be told and causes us to weep?  I did not know there was anything so sad in life, nor that it frightened those who looked upon it....  And nothing can have occurred that I should be afraid to see them so at peace....  They have too much confidence in this world....  There they are, separated from the enemy by a poor window....  They think nothing will happen because they have shut the door, and do not know that something is always happening in our souls, and that the world does not end at the doors of our houses....  They are so sure of their little life and do not suspect how many others know more of it than they; and that I, poor old man,—­I hold here, two steps from their door, all their little happiness, like a sick bird, in my old hands I do not dare to open....