the beasties are beginning to take to me, and faith! when I was up there in the Old Field this morning, and gave a look at that d--d Sedan lying yonder in the distance, you can't tell how good it made me feel to be guiding my oxen and driving the plow through the furrow, all alone in the bright sunshine.'
As soon as it was fairly dark, Doctor Dalichamp came driving up in his old gig. It was his intention to see Maurice to the frontier. Father Fouchard, well pleased to be rid of one of his guests at least, stepped out upon the road to watch and make sure there were none of the enemy's patrols prowling in the neighborhood, while Silvine put a few stitches in the blouse of the defunct ambulance man, on the sleeve of which the red cross of the corps was prominently displayed. The doctor, before taking his place in the vehicle, examined Jean's leg anew, but could not as yet promise that he would be able to save it. The patient was still in a profound lethargy, recognizing no one, never opening his mouth to speak, and Maurice was about to leave him without the comfort of a farewell, when, bending over to give him a last embrace, he saw him open his eyes to their full extent; the lips parted, and in a faint voice he said:
'You are going away?' And in reply to their astonished looks: 'Yes, I heard what you said, though I could not stir. Take the remainder of the money, then. Put your hand in my trousers' pocket and take it.'
Each of them had remaining nearly two hundred francs of the sum they had received from the corps paymaster.
But Maurice protested. 'The money!' he exclaimed. 'Why, you have more need of it than I, who have the use of both my legs. Two hundred francs will be abundantly sufficient to see me to Paris, and to get knocked in the head afterward won't cost me a penny. I thank you, though, old fellow, all the same, and good-by and good-luck to you; thanks, too, for having always been so good and thoughtful, for, had it not been for you, I should certainly be lying now at the bottom of some ditch, like a dead dog.'
Jean made a deprecating gesture. 'Hush. You owe me nothing; we are quits. Would not the Prussians have gathered me in out there the other day had you not picked me up and carried me off on your back? and yesterday again you saved me from their clutches. Twice have I been beholden to you for my life, and now I am in your debt. Ah, how unhappy I shall be when I am no longer with you!' His voice trembled and tears rose to his eyes. 'Kiss me, dear boy!'
They embraced, and, as it had been in the wood the day before, that kiss set the seal to the brotherhood of dangers braved in each other's company, those few weeks of soldier's life in common that had served to bind their hearts together with closer ties than years of ordinary friendship could have done. Days of famine, sleepless nights, the fatigue of the weary march, death ever present to their eyes, these things made the foundation on which their affection rested. When two hearts have thus by mutual gift bestowed themselves the one upon the other and become fused and molten into one, is it possible ever to sever the connection? But the kiss they had exchanged the day before, among the darkling shadows of the forest, was replete with the joy of their new-found safety and the hope that their escape awakened in their bosom, while this was the kiss of parting, full of anguish and doubt unutterable. Would they meet again some day? and how, under what circumstances of sorrow or of gladness?
Doctor Dalichamp had clambered into his gig and was calling to Maurice. The young man threw all his heart and soul into the embrace he gave his sister Henriette, who, pale as death in her black mourning garments, looked on his face in silence through her tears.
'He whom I leave to your care is my brother. Watch over him, love him as I love him!'
IV.
Jean's chamber was a large room, with floor of brick and whitewashed walls, that had once done duty as a store-room for the fruit grown on the farm. A faint, pleasant odor of pears and apples lingered there still, and for furniture there was an iron bedstead, a pine table and two chairs, to say nothing of a huge old walnut clothes-press, tremendously deep and wide, that looked as if it might hold an army. A lazy, restful quiet reigned there all day long, broken only by the deadened sounds that came from the adjacent stables, the faint lowing of the cattle, the occasional thud of a hoof upon the earthen floor. The window, which had a southern aspect, let in a flood of cheerful sunlight; all the view it afforded was a bit of hillside and a wheat field, edged by a little wood. And this mysterious chamber was so well hidden from prying eyes that never a one in all the world would have suspected its existence.
As it was to be her kingdom, Henriette constituted herself lawmaker from the beginning. The regulation was that no one save she and the doctor should have access to Jean; this in order to avert suspicion. Silvine, even, was never to set foot in the room unless by direction. Early each morning the two women came in and put things to rights, and after that, all the long day, the door was as impenetrable as if it had been a wall of stone. And thus it was that Jean found himself suddenly secluded from the world, after many weeks of tumultuous activity, seeing no face save that of the gentle woman whose footfall on the floor gave back no sound. She appeared to him, as he had beheld her for the first time down yonder in Sedan, like an apparition, with her somewhat large mouth, her delicate, small features, her hair the hue of ripened grain, hovering about his bedside and ministering to his wants with an air of infinite goodness.
The patient's fever was so violent during the first few days that Henriette scarce ever left him. Doctor Dalichamp dropped in every morning on his way to the hospital and examined and dressed the wound. As the ball had passed out, after breaking the tibia, he was surprised that the case presented no better aspect; he feared there was a splinter of the bone remaining there that he had not succeeded in finding with the probe, and that might make resection necessary. He mentioned the matter to Jean, but the young man could not endure the thought of an operation that would leave him with one leg shorter than the other and lame him permanently. No, no! he would rather die than be a cripple for life. So the good doctor, leaving the wound to develop further symptoms, confined himself for the present to applying a dressing of lint saturated with sweet oil and phenic acid having first inserted a drain-an India rubber tube-to carry off the pus. He frankly told his patient, however, that unless he submitted to an operation he must not hope to have the use of his limb for a very long time. Still, after the second week, the fever subsided and the young man's general condition was improved, so long as he could be content to rest quiet in his bed.
Then Jean's and Henriette's relations began to be established on a more systematic basis. Fixed habits commenced to prevail; it seemed to them that they had never lived otherwise-that they were to go on living forever in that way. All the hours and moments that she did not devote to the ambulance were spent with him; she saw to it that he had his food and drink at proper intervals. She assisted him to turn in bed with a strength of wrist that no one, seeing her slender arms, would have supposed was in her. At times they would converse; but as a general thing, especially in the earlier days, they had not much to say. They never seemed to tire of each other's company, though. On the whole it was a very pleasant life they led in that calm, restful atmosphere, he with the horrible scenes of the battlefield still fresh in his memory, she in her widow's weeds, her heart bruised and bleeding with the great loss she had sustained. At first he had experienced a sensation of embarrassment, for he felt she was his superior, almost a lady, indeed, while he had never been aught more than a common soldier and a peasant. He could barely read and write. When finally he came to see that she affected no airs of superiority, but treated him on the footing of an equal, his confidence returned to him in a measure and he showed himself in his true colors, as a man of intelligence by reason of his sound, unpretentious common sense. Besides, he was surprised at times to think he could note a change was gradually coming over him; it seemed to him that his mind was less torpid than it had been, that it was clearer and more active, that he had novel ideas in his head, and more of them; could it be that the abominable life he had been leading for the last two months, his horrible sufferings, physical and moral, had exerted a refining influence on him? But that which assisted him most to overcome his shyness was to find that she was really not so very much wiser than he. She was but a little child when, at her mother's death, she became the household drudge, with her three men to care for, as she herself expressed it-her grandfather, her father, and her brother-and she had not had the time to lay in a large stock of learning. She could read and write, could spell words that were not too long, and 'do sums,' if they were not too intricate; and that was the extent of her acquirement. And if she continued to intimidate him still, if he considered her far and away the superior of all other women upon earth, it was because he knew the ineffable tenderness, the goodness of heart, the unflinching courage, that animated that frail little body, who went about her duties silently and met them as if they had been pleasures.
They had in Maurice a subject of conversation that was of common interest to them both and of which they never wearied. It was to Maurice's friend, his brother, to whom she was devoting herself thus tenderly, the brave,
