Mère Marchette did not tell Pierre of the discovery she had made. She was only more gentle with him, while in secret she prayed more fervently. For some days longer the lad's mysterious absence continued, the sad hours of the evening stretching like long deserts of agony, over which the soul of Mère Marchette walked painfully with bleeding feet. And then one night Pierre came home with eyes aglow, and all was explained. He put into his grandmother's hand a little pile of francs, a sum pitiful enough in itself but large to them, and told how a milliner in the street beyond had employed him in moving boxes and clearing out the attics of her house, which were to be remodelled into lodgings. This had been his secret, and in his thought of the joyful surprise he was to give his grandmother he had forgotten the pain she might endure by misunderstanding his absence. It was such trifles as this that were the great events in the life of Mère Marchette and Pierre. There was a tenderness, an unselfishness, an idyllic devotion in their love which no amount of wealth, or culture, or rank could have heightened; but in the lad's veins was the blood of a soldier, that stirred hot with the currents of a vigorous youth. Of the army he had dreamed from his cradle, and strong as was his love for Mère Marchette the force of destiny was stronger. It was the old tragedy of youth and age, of the absorption of maternal love and the restless impulses of the boy's heart. Pierre justified his desire to himself with the excuse that he could earn more money in the ranks; but his grandmother knew, only too well, the force of the instinct he had inherited. She had seen the same struggle in the life of his father. When Pierre was eighteen he shouldered his musket and marched away, leaving poor old Mère Marchette as much a stranger in Paris as when she had come to it two years before to weep and pray alone. It would hardly be within the power of words to paint the anguish which lay between Pierre's departure and that hot July noon when Mère Marchette lay dying at the Salpêtrière. Always in Paris she had been like a wild thing, caged and bewildered, confused by the life that swirled about her in the great city, even when she had been sustained by the presence of Pierre. When he was gone the gentle old soul began to die of homesickness and heartbreak. For two years she fought death stolidly but persistently, refusing to acknowledge to herself that she was breaking down under the stress of loneliness and sorrow. She came of a race that died hard, and although she was past eighty she looked forward hopefully to the time when Pierre should leave the army and come back to live with her again.