I was exploring this ruin alone.

Suddenly I perceived behind a bit of wall a being, a kind of phantom, like the spirit of this ancient and crumbling habitation.

I was taken aback with surprise, almost with fear, when I recognized the old lady whom I had seen twice.

She was weeping, with big tears in her eyes, and held her handkerchief in her hand.

I turned around to go away, when she spoke to me, apparently ashamed to have been surprised in her grief.

“Yes, monsieur, I am crying.  That does not happen often to me.”

“Pardon me, madame, for having disturbed you,” I stammered, confused, not knowing what to say.  “Some misfortune has doubtless come to you.”

“Yes.  No—­I am like a lost dog,” she murmured, and began to sob, with her handkerchief over her eyes.

Moved by these contagious tears, I took her hand, trying to calm her.  Then brusquely she told me her history, as if no longer ably to bear her grief alone.

“Oh!  Oh!  Monsieur—­if you knew—­the sorrow in which I live—­in what sorrow.

“Once I was happy.  I have a house down there—­a home.  I cannot go back to it any more; I shall never go back to it again, it is too hard to bear.

“I have a son.  It is he! it is he!  Children don’t know.  Oh, one has such a short time to live!  If I should see him now I should perhaps not recognize him.  How I loved him?  How I loved him!  Even before he was born, when I felt him move.  And after that!  How I have kissed and caressed and cherished him!  If you knew how many nights I have passed in watching him sleep, and how many in thinking of him.  I was crazy about him.  When he was eight years old his father sent him to boarding-school.  That was the end.  He no longer belonged to me.  Oh, heavens!  He came to see me every Sunday.  That was all!

“He went to college in Paris.  Then he came only four times a year, and every time I was astonished to see how he had changed, to find him taller without having seen him grow.  They stole his childhood from me, his confidence, and his love which otherwise would not have gone away from me; they stole my joy in seeing him grow, in seeing him become a little man.

“I saw him four times a year.  Think of it!  And at every one of his visits his body, his eye, his movements, his voice his laugh, were no longer the same, were no longer mine.  All these things change so quickly in a child; and it is so sad if one is not there to see them change; one no longer recognizes him.

“One year he came with down on his cheek!  He! my son!  I was dumfounded —­would you believe it?  I hardly dared to kiss him.  Was it really he, my little, little curly head of old, my dear; dear child, whom I had held in his diapers or my knee, and who had nursed at my breast with his little greedy lips—­was it he, this tall, brown boy, who no longer knew how to kiss me, who seemed to love me as a matter of duty, who called me ‘mother’ for the sake of politeness, and who kissed me on the forehead, when I felt like crushing him in my arms?