The young Greek had become another creature, since the mysterious
departure of her husband. Her rosy color and her lovely smile were both
gone. But she was wonderfully beautiful, in spite of her paleness, her
downcast eyelashes and languid attitude. She looked like Ariadne waiting
for Theseus. Longing and expectation lay in every look, in the low tone
of her voice, in her measured walk. At the sound of approaching steps,
the opening of a door or the unexpected tones of a man's voice, she would
start, get up and listen, and then sink back into the old waiting,
longing attitude, disappointed but not hopeless. She began to dream
again, as she had been so fond of doing in her girlish days.

She was her old self only when playing with her child. Then the color
came back to her cheeks, her eyes sparkled, she seemed once more to live
in the present, and not only in the past or future.

Her child was everything to her. In that little one Bartja seemed to be
still alive, and she could love the child with all her heart and
strength, without taking one iota from her love to him. With this little
creature the gods had mercifully given her an aim in life and a link with
the lower world, the really precious part of which had seemed to vanish
with her vanished husband. Sometimes, as she looked into her baby's blue
eyes, so wonderfully like Bartja's, she thought: Why was not she born a
boy? He would have grown more like his father from day to day, and at
last, if such a thing indeed could ever be, a second Bartja would have
stood before me.

But such thoughts generally ended soon in her pressing the little one
closer than ever to her heart, and blaming herself for ingratitude and
folly.