She made no reply, but lay staring before her. An emptiness began to stretch before her, in endless vistas. It was a shadowy image of their evening of rapture, but no light beamed out of the shadow.
“Emptiness!” she muttered through her closed lips.
She would have liked to ask Jules whether he was still, as formerly, afraid of the emptiness within himself; but a gentleness of pity, a soft feeling, a sweetening of the bitterness which filled her being, stayed her.
“To take leave?” she repeated, with a smile of melancholy; and the big tears fell heavily, drop by drop, upon her fingers wrung together.
“Yes, Auntie....”
He could no longer restrain himself: a single sob convulsed his throat, but he gave a cough to conceal it. Cecile threw her arm round his neck:
“You are very fond of ... Taco, are you not?” she asked; and it struck her that this was the first time that she had pronounced the name, for she had never called Quaerts by it: she had never called him by any name.
He did not answer at first, but nestled in her arm, in her embrace, and began to cry:
“Yes, I can’t tell you how fond I am of him,” he said.