Sometimes, too, Renée would let a few words slip, showing that she was
mourning her fate as sick people do, words which sink to the heart and
give one a chill like death itself.
One day her father was reading the newspaper to her; she took it from
him to look at the marriage announcements.
"Twenty-nine! How old she was, wasn't she?" she said, as though speaking
to herself. She had been glancing down the death column. M. Mauperin did
not answer; he paced up and down the room for a few minutes and then
went away.
When Renée was alone she got up to close the door, which her father had
not pulled to, and which kept banging. She fancied she heard a groan in
the corridor and looked, but there was no one there; she listened a
minute; but as everything was silent again she was just going to close
the door, when she thought she heard the same sound again. She went out
into the corridor as far as her father's room. It was from there that it
came. The key was not in the lock, and Renée stooped down and, through
the keyhole, saw her father, who had flung himself on his bed, weeping
bitterly and shaken with sobs. His head was buried in the pillow, and he
was endeavouring to stifle down his tears and his despair.