Page:Yiddish Tales.djvu/378

 374 S. LIBIN

Dobe, sitting by the sick child's cot, began to speak, gravely, and as in a dream :

"Who knows? Who knows? Perhaps? Perhaps?" She did not conclude.

"Perhaps what?" asked Ginzburg, impatiently.

"Why should it come like this ?" Dobe went on. "The same time, the same sickness?"

"A simple blind coincidence of circumstances," re- plied her husband.

"But so exactly one like the other, as if somebody had made it happen on purpose."

Ginzburg understood his wife's meaning, and answer- ed short and sharp:

"Dobe, don't talk nonsense."

Meanwhile Dvorehle's illness developed, and the day came on which the doctor said that a crisis would occur within twenty-four hours. What this meant to the Ginzburgs would be difficult to describe, but each of them determined privately not to survive the loss of their second child.

They sat beside it, not lifting their eyes from its face. They were pale and dazed with grief and sleep- less nights, their hearts half-dead within them, they shed no tears, they were so much more dead than alive themselves, and the child's flame of life flickered and dwindled, flickered and dwindled.

A tangle of memories was stirring in Ginzburg's head, all relating to deaths and graves. He lived through the death of their first child with all details his father's death, his mother's early in a summer morning that was- that was he recalls it as though it were to-day.