Ah, what a rain of sorrows is now falling upon the world!" That same evening, on leaving the house, he had met her by her door.
She appeared like another woman, with an old look as though in these agonizing hours she had been suffering for fifteen years.

In vain the kindly Tchernoff had tried to cheer her up, urging her to accept quietly her husband's absence so as not to harm the little one who was coming.
"For the unhappy creature is going to be a mother," he said sadly.

"She hides her condition with a certain modesty, but from my window, I have often seen her making the dainty layette." The woman had listened to him as though she did not understand.

Words were useless before her desperation.

She could only sob as though talking to herself, "I am a German.