When he got up, the fancies and fears of the past evening returned. He was surprised that his mother was not yet visible. As a rule, she came into his room to kiss him and say good-morning while he was in bed. She had not come in this morning. But he heard her coming and going in the neighboring room. He opened the door. Kneeling on the floor, she was dusting the furniture and did not turn round. Marc said good-morning to her. She turned her smiling eyes on him and said, "Good-morning, my dear." Then she went on with her work, paying no more attention to him.
He expected she would ask him about his evening. He detested these questions, but when she did not ask them he was vexed. She went into her room, put it in order and finished dressing. It was time for her classes; she was getting ready to go out He saw her looking at herself in the mirror, with dark circles about her eyes, her face still showing lines of fatigue, but with a light in her eyes! Her mouth was smiling. He was astonished at the sight. He had expected to find her sad and he was even ready to pity her in his heart; this disturbed his plans. The little man's logic was upset by it.
But Annette had her own logic. "The heart has its reasons" which a sense higher than reason understands. Annette had ceased to worry about what others might think. She knew now that you must not ask others to understand you. If they love you, it is with their eyes closed. They don't close them often! . . . "Let them be as they wish to be! Whatever they are, I love them. I cannot live without loving them. And if they don't love me I have enough love in my heart both for myself and for them."
She smiled into the mirror with a smile that came from far deeper depths than her eyes, smiled at the fire of which they were a spark, at eternal Love. She let her arms fall from her head, turned towards her son, saw the child's troubled face, remembered his evening out, took hold of the tip of his chin, and, letting the syllables drop, said gaily, "You were dancing? I'm so glad! And now you must sing!"
She laughed as she saw his amazed expression, caressed him with her eyes, kissed him on his nose and, picking up her bag from the table, went out, saying, "Good-bye, my little cricket!"
In the vestibule he heard her whistling a careless tune. (It was a talent he envied her even while he despised it, for she whistled much better than he.)
He was indignant! This indecent gaiety after all the evening's anxiety. . . . She had escaped him. He denounced the eternal caprices of women, their lack of seriousness, as he had heard others do . . . "la donna mobile."
He was about to go out when a piece of paper in the scrap-basket caught his attention. At a distance the sharp, prying eyes of the rapacious child unthinkingly deciphered a few words on a fragment of the sheet. He stopped short. . . . These words. . . . His mother's writing! He picked them up, read them feverishly, at random at first, one at a time. These flaming words! . . . As they were torn into bits, the emotion they called up, interrupted in the midst of its flight, was all the more fascinating. . . . He gathered them together, rummaged in the basket for the smallest fragments, took them all and patiently pieced them together. His hands trembled at the secret he had captured by surprise. When he had assembled all the pieces and was able to grasp the poem as a whole, he was completely taken aback. He did not understand it very well, but the wild fervor of this solitary song revealed to him unknown depths of passion and grief that exalted and dismayed him. Was it possible that these stormy cries had come from his mother's breast? . . . No, no, it wasn't possible! He wouldn't have it. He told himself that she had copied them from a book. . . . But from what book? He couldn't ask her. . . . And yet, suppose it wasn't taken from a book . . . ? The tears came, the need of crying out his emotion, his love, a longing to throw himself into his mother's arms, at her feet, to open his heart to her, to read her own . . . And he couldn't do it. . . .
When his mother came home at noon for lunch, the boy, who had spent the whole morning reading and copying the torn fragments and had thrust them in an envelope into his breast, said nothing to her. Sitting at his table, he even refrained from rising and turning his head towards her when she entered. The more burning was his desire to know, the stiffer was the constraint that led him to conceal his anxiety under a mask of insensibility. If, after all, these tragic words were not Annette's! Doubt returned to him at the sight of his mother's tranquil face. . . . But the other, the upsetting doubt, persisted all the same. . . . Supposing they were hers? . . . This woman, my mother? . . . Facing her at table, he did not dare look at her. . . . But when her back was turned and she moved about the room, looking for something, carrying a plate, he stared at her eagerly with questioning eyes that asked: "Who are you?"
He could not define his troubled, fascinated, uneasy impression. But Annette, full of her new life, noticed nothing.