"A simple blind coincidence of circumstances," replied her husband.
"But so exactly—one like the other, as if somebody had made it happen on purpose."
Ginzburg understood his wife's meaning, and answered short and sharp:
"Dobe, don't talk nonsense."
Meanwhile Dvorehle's illness developed, and the day came on which the doctor said that a crisis would occur within twenty-four hours. What this meant to the Ginzburgs would be difficult to describe, but each of them determined privately not to survive the loss of their second child.
They sat beside it, not lifting their eyes from its face. They were pale and dazed with grief and sleepless nights, their hearts half-dead within them, they shed no tears, they were so much more dead than alive themselves, and the child's flame of life flickered and dwindled, flickered and dwindled.
A tangle of memories was stirring in Ginzburg's head, all relating to deaths and graves. He lived through the death of their first child with all details—his father's death, his mother's—early in a summer morning—that was—that was—he recalls it—as though it were to-day.
"What is to-day?" he wonders. "What day of the month is it?" And then he remembers, it is the first of May.
"The same day," he murmurs, as if he were talking in his sleep.
"What the same day?" asks Dobe.