All snored and groaned as they lay in different corners.

The watchman went to sleep the first of all, he had drunk so much in honour of the young masters' home-coming.
The mother alone did not sleep.

She bent over the pillow of her beloved sons, as they lay side by side; she smoothed with a comb their carelessly tangled locks, and moistened them with her tears.

She gazed at them with her whole soul, with every sense; she was wholly merged in the gaze, and yet she could not gaze enough.

She had fed them at her own breast, she had tended them and brought them up; and now to see them only for an instant! "My sons, my darling sons! what will become of you! what fate awaits you ?" she said, and tears stood in the wrinkles which disfigured her once beautiful face.