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….
MARY.
Have pity, grandfather….