"In an hour, Mère Marchette," he said, answering her look--"in an hour he will be here; keep up a good heart. You do not suffer?" The old woman feebly shook her head. The ghost of a smile, faint but full of happiness, shone on her face. She did not speak, but she thanked him with a look before she closed her eyes and lay motionless as before he had come. The young man looked at her a moment, an expression of pity in his brown eyes; then with a sigh he turned away and moved softly down the ward again. By the door he encountered one of the nurses, who had risen and come forward to speak with him. "Will she live, M. Lommel?" "Yes," the doctor answered. "She has given all her energies for days to keeping alive till her grandson gets here. It is very singular," he went on, in a voice of low distinctness that could have been acquired only in sick-rooms, "how her instinct has taught her to save her strength. She neither moves nor speaks; she simply lives." "She has been that way," the nurse returned, "ever since we told her that Pierre was coming. Will he be here by twelve?" "Not till half-past twelve," Dr. Lommel replied. "I will return before then." And he went out into the hot sunshine. II. Everybody connected with the ward of the Salpêtrière wherein she was had a kindly feeling for poor old Mère Marchette. The doctors and the nurses could not have been more kind or more tender had she been of their own blood. She was one of those who always win affection. She was so patient, so simple, so kindly. She was a peasant woman from Normandy, who had in her old age drifted to Paris with her grandson Pierre, a lad of sixteen years. All the rest of the family were dead. Pierre's father had been a soldier, and it was with the hope of securing a pension for the son that Mère Marchette had left her home and the life in Normandy she loved, to throw herself into Paris as into the sea. The dead soldier, however, had been mustered out before the malarial fever, contracted in the swamps of the Landes, had developed itself, and the pension could not be obtained. The disappointment was a bitter one, made worse by the fact that Mère Marchette had been told by one and another that the claim would have been granted had the case been properly managed. The poor old creature could not escape a feeling of self-blame in thinking that it was her want of keenness which had deprived Pierre of his pension. Her grandson for her represented the world, and to him she devoted all her energies. She toiled for him, and watched and suffered with that unselfish egotism possible only to the old and lonely.