"Oh, Marc, I implore you, don't be so ill. I don't want you to die."
Nor had he the least desire to do so. He liked to be condoled with, but he had not wanted as much as all this! Hearing uttered what he feared himself, he was frozen with fright. He did not want to show this, but he did show it.
"You see, you're hiding it from me. You know. I am very ill."
"No, no, I don't want it to be so. I don't know. I don't want you to be very ill. . . . Oh, Marc, don't die! If you die, I want to die with you!"
She flung herself on his neck, weeping. He was very much moved, and he too wept; he did not know whether it was because of her or himself. At the sound the mothers ran in scolding and separating them. They felt very close together at that moment.
By the following morning, however, Marc had thought things over. He was no longer anxious; he was even annoyed—for to drive away his fears they had made fun of him—to have shown himself a coward; he blamed Odette for having led him, by her stupid anxiety, into betraying these signs of weakness. And then he heard her laughing and saw her passing his door, overflowing with health. He was angry with her because of this health. She had too much of it. He envied her and he was humiliated.
After he was well again, he continued for a long time to feel mortified for having betrayed himself before his cousin's eyes. He was the more so because he had really been afraid and she had seen it. Once her emotion had passed, Odette maliciously remembered it all. She had seen him off his high horse, a timid little boy. She only liked him better for this. But he could not forgive her.
[XXX]
Marc was well again. Odette was flourishing. The previous summer she had proudly made her first communion. (It was about this date that the Church, like Joconda in search of innocence, had sniffed with its great distrustful nose the air of the time and made up its mind that there was no such thing as real innocence after the age of seven.) Odette considered herself a woman and tried to appear one by toning down her impetuosity, the impetuosity of a young tethered goat—though at any moment, with a caper, the little horned creature would escape from one's hands. . . . Sylvie was happy; her business was going well. And Annette, who found in her sister's household nourishment for the need of affection which her age and her ordeal had somewhat tempered, seemed to have reached a haven of peace. Everything was hopeful.
One warm afternoon, between three and four o'clock, at the end of October, one of those radiant days when the unveiled light seems as naked as the stripped trees, the windows were open to let in the rays of an autumn sun as mild and golden as honey. It was the day after Odette's eighth birthday. Annette was at Sylvie's. In the room over the court, they were looking out together and examining materials, gossiping and gravely occupied with their investigation. Odette was on the other side of the passage, in the room at the end that overlooked the street. Just a few minutes before, the inquisitive child had peeped through the half-open door to see what they were doing. They had pretended to scold her and had sent her back again to finish a little piece of work before they all had tea together. Marc was at school; they were expecting him home again in half an hour.