bing sound, as a child cries when it is sorry
and not naughty.

No one heard her, no one came near her; she was all alone, and
in a few minutes she stopped crying, half frightened at her
own voice in the silence and darkness. And then she began to
wonder if her father were still in the next room, or whether
they had taken him away anywhere; if not, he was all alone in
there, as she was in here. It would be some comfort to be with
him, she thought. Madelon knew that he was dead, but death was
an unfamiliar experience with her; and she could not perhaps
clearly separate this hour from all other hours when she had
been hurt, or sorrowful, or frightened, and had run to her
father to be comforted.

She got up, and, opening the door, stole softly into the other
room. It was not quite so dark in there: the windows and
Venetian shutters were wide open, and a lamp in the street
below gave an uncertain light, by which she could just
distinguish the gleam of the mirror, the table in the centre
of the room, and the bed, where the outline of a silent form
was vaguely defined under the white covering sheet. Madelon
had had some half-formed idea of getting on to the bed, and
nestling down by her father, as she had done only the evening
before, when he had put his arm round her, and they had talked
together; but now a chill dread crept over her--a sense of
change, of separation; she had not even the courage to raise
the sheet and look upon his face. She stood gazing for a
moment, afraid to go back into the darkness of her own room;
and then, with a sudden movement, as though urged by some
terror, she turned quickly away, and went swiftly to the open
window. She looked down into the narrow, dark street, dimly
illuminated by an occasional lamp; she looked up to the
starlit space of sky visible above the house-roofs and
chimneys, and neither above nor below did she find any
comfort; for a sudden awful realization of death had come to
her in the darkness and silence, almost too keen and terrible
for our poor little Madelon to bear--each realization, too, a
fresh shock, as with an instinctive shrinking from this new
consciousness of an intolerable weight her mind slipped away
into some more familiar channel, only to be brought rudely
back to this fact, so unfamiliar, and yet the only one for her
now, in this sudden shattering of all her small world of hopes
and joys and affections. And is it not, in truth, terrible,
this _strength_ o