She heard Andre’s voice saying clearly, “Whoever else is responsible for the war, the children are not. They must not suffer if we can help it.”
There was a pause when the world seemed to be slowly shifting under her feet.
She knew what was coming. In an instant it came. In all that was left alive of her, she knew that she must try to go on living for the children.
She turned her back on escape, and in a spiritual agony like the physical anguish of child-birth, she put out her hands to grope her way back to the fiery ordeal of life.
Her hands, groping in the darkness, fell on something cold and metallic and round—Andre’s watch, which he had left for Michel!
But if his watch was there, he had been there himself.
She ran trembling to the match box, struck a light, and looked. Yes, there was the watch, and a burned-out cigarette beside it.
The match went out suddenly in the cold, damp breath from the window.
André had come, then! And she—she was in such a pass that she was incapable of believing that her husband had been with her for an hour. Stretched on the rack of long separation, her body and brain had lost the power to conceive of happiness as real. She felt now that she had not really believed in his presence any of the time. That was why she had fancied the children looked oddly at him. She had not been able to believe it!