Then there came a pause, and amid the
shrill cries of the boys and girls playing at hide-and-seek a number of
little shadows flitted through the sunlight: they were the shadows of the
poor doomed babes who scarce saw the light before they were carried off
from homes and hospitals to be abandoned in corners, and die of cold, and
perhaps even of starvation!
Mathieu had been unable to answer a word. And his emotion increased when
he noticed Morange huddled up on a chair, and gazing with blurred,
tearful eyes at little Gervais, who was laughingly toddling hither and
thither. Had a vision come to him also? Had the phantom of his dead wife,
shrinking from the duties of motherhood and murdered in a hateful den,
risen before him in that sunlit garden, amid all the turbulent mirth of
happy, playful children?
"What a pretty girl your daughter Reine is!" said Mathieu, in the hope of
drawing the accountant from his haunting remorse. "Just look at her
running about!--so girlish still, as if she were not almost old enough to
be married."
Morange slowly raised his head and looked at his daughter. And a smile
returned to his eyes, still moist with tears.
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