And restfully, pettingly, he said once more:  ’How warm your hand is now! it is as nice as the sun.  Don’t let us talk any more.  It makes me hot.’

A quivering silence fell from the blue ceiling of the large room.  The spirit lamp had just gone out, and from the kettle came a finer and finer thread of steam.  Albine and Serge, their heads side by side upon the pillow, gazed at the large calico curtains drawn across the windows.  Serge’s eyes, especially, were attracted to them as to the very source of light, in which he sought to steep himself, as in diluted sunshine fitted to his weakness.  He could tell that the sun lay behind that yellower gleam upon one corner of the curtain, and that sufficed to make him feel himself again.  Meanwhile a far-off rustle of leaves came upon his listening ear, and against the right-hand window the clean-cut greenish shadow of a lofty bough brought him disturbing thoughts of the forest which he could feel to be near him.

‘Would you like me to open the curtains?’ asked Albine, misunderstanding his steady gaze.

‘No, no,’ he hastily replied.

‘It’s a fine day; you would see the sunlight and the trees.’

’No, please don’t. . . .  I don’t want to see anything outside.  That bough there tires me with its waving and its rising, as if it was alive.  Leave your hand here, I will go to sleep.  All is white now.  It’s so nice.’

And then he calmly fell asleep, while Albine watched beside him and breathed upon his face to make his slumber cool.

II

The fine weather broke up on the morrow, and it rained heavily.  Serge’s fever returned, and he spent a day of suffering, with his eyes despairingly fixed upon the curtains through which the light now fell dim and ashy grey as in a cellar.  He could no longer see a trace of sunshine, and he looked in vain for the shadow that had scared him, the shadow of that lofty bough which had disappeared amid the mist and the pouring rain, and seemed to have carried away with it the whole forest.  Towards evening he became slightly delirious and cried out to Albine that the sun was dead, that he could hear all the sky, all the country bewailing the death of the sun.  She had to soothe him like a child, promising him the sun, telling him that it would come back again, that she would give it to him.  But he also grieved for the plants.  The seeds, he said, must be suffering underground, waiting for the return of light; they had nightmares, they also dreamed that they were crawling along an underground passage, hindered by mounds of ruins, struggling madly to reach the sunshine.  And he began to weep and sob out in low tones that winter was a disease of the earth, and that he should die with the earth, unless the springtide healed them both.