Awaken, sleeping beauty,
Awaken, if you sleep!
For the first time I saw my wife’s calmness—that surprising calm to which I was only now growing accustomed—shattered, as if it were a crystal that had been too roughly handled.
“Soon,” she whispered.
She did not finish her thought, but I completed it myself;—one day, soon, she would awaken no more. And I sent the troop of children away, no longer able to endure their gaiety.
* * *
That same day she asked for Dilette, whom she no longer kept so much near her, not to affect or sadden her precocious sensibility unduly. The child was loth to leave her again: she looked at her insistently and too closely.
“Take her away,” Raymonde begged me.
I had almost to take the child away by force. When she had gone, Raymonde drew me down as if to whisper to me.
“Promise me,” she said, “that you will always love her, that you will never let any one take her place in your affections.”