She replied: "Oh! it matters little, since we were bound to see one another again—a little sooner—a little later!"
As she added nothing more, he hastened to say in an inquiring tone: "I hope you are getting on well by this time?"
"Thanks. As well as one can get on, after such shocks!"
She was very pale and thin, but prettier than before her confinement. Her eyes especially had gained a depth of expression which he had never seen in them before. They seemed to have acquired a darker shade, a blue less clear, less transparent, more intense. Her hands were so white that their flesh looked like that of a corpse.
She went on: "Those are hours very hard to live through. But, when one has suffered thus, one feels strong till the end of one's days."
Much affected, he murmured: "Yes; they are terrible experiences!"
She repeated, like an echo: "Terrible."
For some moments there had been light movements in the cradle—the all but imperceptible sounds of an infant awakening from sleep. Bretigny could not longer avert his gaze, preyed upon by a melancholy, morbid yearning which gradually grew stronger, tortured by the desire to behold what lived within there.
Then he observed that the curtains of the tiny bed were fastened from top to bottom with the gold pins which Christiane was accustomed to wear in her corsage. Often had he amused himself in bygone days by taking them out and pinning them again on the shoulders of his beloved, those fine pins with crescent-shaped heads. He understood what she meant; and a poignant emotion seized him, made him feel shriveled up before this barrier of golden spikes which forever separated him from this child.
A little cry, a shrill plaint arose in this white prison. Christiane quickly rocked the wherry, and in a rather abrupt tone: