hing ardor and revolt--

Now the first drops of water were beginning to fall on the road,
separate and heavy on the strewn leaves.

As the day before, when he returned home, at twilight, his mother was
alone.

He found her asleep, in a bad sleep, agitated, burning.

Rambling in his house he tried, in order to make it less sinister, to
light in the large, lower chimney a fire of branches, but it went out
smoking. Outside, torrents of rain fell. Through the windows, as through
gray shrouds, the village hardly appeared, effaced under a winter
squall. The wind and the rain whipped the walls of the isolated house,
around which, once more, would thicken the grand blackness of the
country in rainy nights--that grand blackness, that grand silence, to
which he had long been unaccustomed. And in his childish heart, came
little by little, a cold of solitude and of abandonment; he lost even
his energy, the consciousness of his love, of his strength and of his
youth; he felt vanishing, before the misty evening, all his projects of
struggle and of resistance. The future which he had formed a moment
ago became miserable or chimerical in his eyes, that future of a pelota
player, of a poor amuser of the crowds, at the mercy of a malady or of
a moment of weakness--His hopes of the day-time were going out, based,
doubtless, on unstable things, fleeing now in the night--

Then he felt transported, as in his childhood, toward that soft refuge
which was his mother; he went up, on tiptoe, to see her, even asleep,
and to remain there, near her bed, while she slept.

And, when he had lighted in the room, far from her, a discreet lamp,
she appeared to him more changed than she had been by the fever of
yesterday; the possibility presented itself, more frightful to his mind,
of losing her, of being alone, of never feeling again on his cheek the
caress of her head.--Moreover, for the first time, she seemed old to
him, and, in the memory of all the deceptions which she had suffered
because of him, he felt a pity for her, a tender and infinite pity,
at sight of her wrinkles which he had not before observed, of her hair
recently whitened at the temples. Oh, a desolate pity and hopeless, with
the conviction that it was too late now to arrange life better.--And
something painful, against which there was no possible resistance, shook
his chest, contracted his young face; objects became confused to his
view, and, in the need of imploring, of asking