I intend to sacrifice my own life for this child’s ... but is that sufficient? Can that avert his fate?
My beautiful, beautiful boy! He is asleep. I have locked both doors and sit with the key in my pocket. Every quarter of an hour I look in at him; he smiles in his sleep as only innocent children smile. Then suddenly he clenches his little fists and his mouth becomes so distorted and ugly that I have to turn away. What can he be dreaming about?
Help me, help! To whom am I praying? I, who am without faith, and without hope. But I am not without love. No longer without love; for I love this poor, miserable child.
Could I but give him back his innocence!... Has he never been innocent like other children? Was he contaminated from the first by the two creatures who gave him life? Is it in my power to atone for others’ sins against him?
I wonder why he tried to run away to-day? Where did he want to go, and what was in his mind? If I had not got him back, God knows, I could not have faced another day.
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I sat with him on my lap, and he looked up at me as if he would ask, “What are you going to do with me?”
His childish gaze was so suspicious and hard. I told him that I wanted to be his mother and to live for nothing else but to make him happy. All the time his little hands were feeling about to find my pocket. I pretended not to see, and smiling angelically, he plunged his hand after my purse, and began to fidget with it till it opened. My heart beat so that I could hear it distinctly resound in my ears.
Is it to be wondered at that he steals? He has known what it is to starve. But now I give him everything that heart can desire. I have bought him a little purse of his own, and filled it with money. Yet still his tiny face retains its expression of desperate greed when he sees me take out money. When will this alter?