I noticed that Madame Lampron was stooping lower and lower over her needles.

He went on: "I have kept the portrait, the one you saw, Fabien.

They would like to have it over yonder.

They are old folk by now.

Every year they ask me for this relic of our common sorrow; every year they send me, about this time a basket of white flowers, chiefly lilacs, the dead girl's flower, and their meaning is, 'Give up to us what is left of her, the masterpiece built up of your youth and hers.' But I am selfish, Fabien.
I, like them, am jealous of all the sorrows this portrait recalls to me, and I deny them.