“A folly! Oh, no! I like you to love my child. If I were to live for a thousand years, Leon, I should never forget the hours during which my heart and brain went through so much suffering; and the last thing I should forget would be the moment which was to me the most solemn and critical of all, and the words I heard and which are stamped on my mind as if they had been burnt in.”
“I do not know what you are talking about.”
“Nor I, either, I believe,” she answered, leaning over him. “Joy has turned my brain, I think, I feel a sort of aberration or bewilderment.... Can it be true that I have my little one? That this angel is still left to comfort me in my loneliness?”
She looked at the child and bending over her, kissed her forehead very softly, so as not to disturb her sleep. When she looked up again at her friend he noted a strange light in her eyes.
“You are too much excited,” he said. “You ought to go to bed and sleep for some time. Poor little mother! You have gone through a great deal since the night before last.”
“Yes,” replied Pepa, “a great deal; but not only now; before that too; I am familiar with misery.”
“Be calm, you are half delirious.”
“And as I was saying,” she went on with an air of sudden recollection, and a bright smile, “I shall never forget your words: ‘Spare her life. She is what I love best in the world.’” Leon looked down. “But I am glad, so glad, that you are so fond of her,” said Pepa on the point of crying. “For then I am not the only creature to love her. You are a good old friend, a friend of my childhood. I have always valued you, and now more than ever, when I see what an interest you take in Monina, a true warm interest.—Leon, I feel that I must break a silence that is killing me and tell you a secret that I cannot bear to keep....”
Her head drooped on Leon’s shoulder; she wept copiously, and he did not speak. He felt the weight of her head, the warmth of her breath, and the moisture of her tears, and he sat silent—stern and self-controlled. Pepa might have been shedding her tears on a rock. Suddenly a sense of dignity and modesty sprang up in Pepa’s soul; she lifted her head, crimson with blushes and gave a little cry of dismay.
“Pepa,” said Leon, taking her hand in a firm, kind grasp, “your child is safe. I am going now.”