idly 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 the helplessness that pressed and bore upon her more fiercely from day to day, clutching at her throat, inexorably demanding a decision, she made that decision and wailed:
“Tell him! Tell him! Tell him!”
