that she alone could divine what those thoughts were.
He sat there with bowed head, but he forbade his lips to frame the question he longed to ask. The letter had been delivered; what more was there for him to know? The stone of the sepulchre had been rolled into its place: but ah! how it weighed upon him, how alive he felt, buried alive beneath that great stone!
His mother began to clear the table, putting each object back in the cupboard that served as a sideboard. It was so quiet that the birds could be heard chirping in the bushes and the regular tap-tap of the stone-breaker by the roadside. It seemed like the end of the world, as though the last habitation of living men was this little white room, with its time-blackened furniture and its tiled flooring, upon which the green and gold light from the high window cast a tremulous reflexion as of water and made the small place seem like some prison chamber in the dungeon of a castle.
Paul had drunk his coffee and eaten his biscuits as usual, and now he was reading the
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