lender throat. Already the child knew, and
raising himself he felt with his lips for the breast. When she placed
it in his mouth he gave a little grunt of satisfaction; he threw himself
upon her with the fine, voracious appetite of a young gentleman who was
determined to live. At first he had clutched the breast with his little
free hand, as if to show that it was his, to defend it and to guard it.
Then, in the joy of the warm stream that filled his throat he raised his
little arm straight up, like a flag. And Clotilde kept her unconscious
smile, seeing him so healthy, so rosy, and so plump, thriving so well
on the nourishment he drew from her. During the first few weeks she had
suffered from a fissure, and even now her breast was sensitive; but she
smiled, notwithstanding, with that peaceful look which mothers wear,
happy in giving their milk as they would give their blood.

When she had unfastened her dress, showing her bare throat and breast,
in the solitude and silence of the study, another of her mysteries,
one of her sweetest and most hidden secrets, was revealed at the same
time--the slender necklace with the seven pearls, the seven fine, milky
stars which the master had put around her neck on a day of misery, in
his mania for giving. Since it had been there no one else had seen it.
It seemed as if she guarded it with as much modesty as if it were a part
of her flesh, so simple, so pure, so childlike. And all the time the
child was nursing she alone looked at it in a dreamy reverie, moved by
the tender memory of the kisses whose warm perfume it still seemed to
keep.

A burst of distant music seemed to surprise Clotilde. She turned her
head and looked across the fields gilded by the oblique rays of the sun.
Ah, yes! the ceremony, the laying of the corner stone yonder! Then
she turned her eyes again on the child, and she gave herself up to the
delight of seeing him with so fine an appetite. She had drawn forward a
little bench, to raise one of her knees, resting her foot upon it,
and she leaned one shoulder against the table, beside the tree and the
blackened fragments of the envelopes. Her thoughts wandered away in an
infinitely sweet reverie, while she felt the best part of herself, the
pure milk, flowing softly, making more and more her own the dear being
she had borne. The child had come, the redeemer, perhaps. The bells
rang, the three wise men had set out, followed by the people, by
rejoicing nature, smiling