less they both felt, while they stared
at each other in despair because they did not know how to spare their
darling, how to spare him, even though they would spare him to-day,
how--how indeed?--to spare him to-morrow! And, because their sorrow was
the same, the same sorrow for their darling, for their comrade, their
consolation, their passion, it was as though, for the first time, after
years and years, they were nearing each other and for the first time
bearing together a part of the heavy burden of life that pressed upon
their small souls. How were they to spare him, how were they to spare
him?

Finding no solution, they each went their own way again, their eyes
still blank with helplessness, their hearts heavy with despair. What had
become of the melancholy contentment that had brought Constance her
gentle happiness? And, when they met again at meals and the boy, the
sensible, merry little comrade of old, who had always enlivened those
meal-times, sat in silence, ate in silence, with his serious boy's face,
firm in outline already and yet with the soft bloom of the child upon
it, and his steel-blue eyes full of thought, then they would timidly
stare at each other again and the same discouragement would send its cry
of despair from out of their timid glance. This was no longer to be
endured, this made them both suffer overmuch, this would have cost them
their lives and the grace of their lives, this they could no longer
face, this made them feel more helpless from day to day.

Though they both of them, separately, took him in their arms, he no
longer said a word, accepted the fact that he was too young to know what
was really true, if the slander was not true; but neither his face nor
his soul brightened and the deepening of his gloom was the measure of
their despair.

"What are we to do?" thought Constance. "What are we to do?" she asked
Van der Welcke.

And she wrung her hands, feeling that the past was now doomed to remain
for ever and that to think anything else was to invite disillusion. Oh,
the past, which not only remained, which not only would cling to them
for ever, but which grew, grew with the child, as though the sorrow of
that past would always blossom anew, again and again, with perennial
grief and woe! Oh, the indestructible sorrow, which always came back to
haunt them, even though it seemed to have died, sunk in a bottomless
pit, the abyss of past years! Until, at last, as in a cry for help in
th