"Oh, Morel! Morel!" murmured Madeleine, "I am parching, dying with thirst. How can you be so cruel as to refuse me a little water?"
"But how can I at present? I must not allow mother to meddle with these stones,—perhaps to lose me a diamond, as she did a year ago; and God alone knows the wretchedness and misery it cost us,—ay, may still occasion us. Ah, that unfortunate loss of the diamond, what have we not suffered by it!"
As the poor lapidary uttered these words, he passed his hand over his aching brow with a desponding air, and said to one of the children:
"Felix, give your mother something to drink. You are awake, and can attend to her."
"No, no," exclaimed Madeleine; "he will take cold. I will wait."
"Oh, mother," said the boy, rising, "never mind me. I shall be quite as warm up as I am in this paillasse."
"Come, will you let the things alone?" cried Morel, in a threatening tone, to the idiot woman, who kept bending over the precious stones and trying to seize them, spite of all his efforts to move her from the table.
"Mother," called out Felix, "what shall I do? The water in the pitcher is frozen quite hard."
"Then break the ice," murmured Madeleine.
"It is so thick, I can't," answered the boy.