It was like the faint noise which attends the rise of a
spring--a slender rill of milk that is to swell and become a river.
Around her the mother heard that source springing up and spreading on all
sides. She was not nourishing alone: the sap of April was dilating the
land, sending a quiver through the woods, raising the long herbage which
embowered her. And beneath her, from the bosom of the earth, which was
ever in travail, she felt that flood of sap reaching and ever pervading
her. And it was like a stream of milk flowing through the world, a stream
of eternal life for humanity's eternal crop. And on that gay day of
spring the dazzling, singing, fragrant countryside was steeped in it all,
triumphal with that beauty of the mother, who, in the full light of the
sun, in view of the vast horizon, sat there nursing her child.
VIII
ON the morrow, after a morning's hard toil at his office at the works,
Mathieu, having things well advanced, bethought himself of going to see
Norine at Madame Bourdieu's. He knew that she had given birth to a child
a fortnight previously, and he wished to ascertain the exact state of
affairs, in order to carry to an end the mission with which Beauchene had
intrusted him.
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