‘Ah! _c’est autre chose!_ You look as if you had a headache too, Tessie.’ ‘Do I? I have been a little worried, that is all.’ ‘Poor child! which of us is without worries? Have we any particular end in walking this way?’ We were on the road to the Château des Roses. ‘Yes, I want to call at the Fromards’. Guillaume is worse to-day, and—and papa has sent them a little money.’ ‘That is very good of him,’ I remarked sarcastically, wishing that ‘papa’ would be just before he was generous. We were scarcely prepared, however, for the scene that awaited us in the cottage of the Fromards. It was a poor place, with plastered walls and a deep thatched roof that almost extinguished it. The sides of the house were yellow and green with dirt and decay, and the smoke of the peat fire was issuing from a hole in the roof, instead of by its legitimate egress, the dilapidated chimney. In front of the entrance door ran a gutter of filthy water, and a large heap of manure and refuse was banked up against the wooden stand which was to be seen outside each door in St. Pucelle, and on which the slaughtered pigs were laid out to be halved and quartered. A few fowls regaling themselves on the dunghill recalled to my mind the fact that it was here Ange came whenever she wanted fresh eggs for her father’s breakfast; but I had barely had time to take in the surroundings of the place, before we were saluted by a loud howl from the doorway, and the Mère Fromard rushed forward, and, seizing Tessie’s hands, began explaining in her Wallon _patois_ how her good Guillaume had gone to his rest but half an hour before, and she was left a lonely widow, with five poor children to battle for in this hard world alone. Before we knew what was going to happen to us, we had been dragged into the presence of the defunct Guillaume, who already lay shrouded and stretched out on two planks in a corner of the general sitting-room, whilst his younger children played on the ground beside him, and one or two fowls, more inquisitive or hungry than the rest, were picking up the crumbs of potato that had fallen on the brick floor. As we entered the house and her eye fell upon the corpse, I saw Tessie’s face turn as white as death itself. Not knowing how far she was accustomed to such scenes, I wanted to draw her back again; but Madame Fromard insisted upon her going forward. ‘Why should she not see him?’ she exclaimed; ‘she has watched him dying for months past; for the want of bread, mamselle, the bread it was his right to have had, and which would have saved him may be from the grave this day. And she was not afraid then—neither she nor Monsieur le Curé—and now that he is silent for ever—that he can no longer speak and ask for his own—why should she be afraid to look on his face, unless it be to remember how it has come to be so still and so silent?’