"Ill luck! _Coton-Maï!_ Ill luck! There's a way to turn ill luck!" And her smile also should have beautified her face, wrinkled and ugly though it was. She did not think any more of the spending of the money, only of the pleasure Anne Marie would take in spending it. The water was low in the well, and there had been a long drought. There are not many old women of seventy-five who could have watered so much ground as abundantly as she did; but whenever she thought of the forty dollars and Anne Marie's smile she would give the thirsting plant an extra bucketful. The twilight was gaining. She paused. "_Coton-Maï_" she exclaimed aloud. "But I must see the old woman smile again over her good luck." Although it was "my girl" face to face, it was always "the old woman" behind each other's back. There was a knot-hole in the plank walls of the house. In spite of Anne Marie's rheumatism they would never stop it up, needing it, they said, for light and air. Jeanne Marie slipped her feet out of her sabots and crept easily toward it, smiling, and saying "_Coton-Maï_!" to herself all the way. She put her eye to the hole. Anne Marie was not in the bed, she who had not left her bed for two months! Jeanne Marie looked through the dim light of the room until she found her. Anne Marie, in her short petticoat and nightsack, with bare legs and feet, was on her knees in the corner, pulling up a plank, hiding--peasants know hiding when they see it--hiding her money away--away--away from whom?--muttering to herself and shaking her old grayhaired head. Hiding her money away from Jeanne Marie! And this was why Jeanne Marie leaned her head against the side of the house and wept. It seemed to her that she had never known her twin sister at all. A CRIPPLED HOPE You must picture to yourself the quiet, dim-lighted room of a convalescent; outside, the dreary, bleak days of winter in a sparsely settled, distant country parish; inside, a slow, smoldering log-fire, a curtained bed, the infant sleeping well enough, the mother wakeful, restless, thought-driven, as a mother must be, unfortunately, nowadays, particularly in that parish, where cotton worms and overflows have acquired such a monopoly of one's future. [Illustration: "THE QUIET, DIM-LIGHTED ROOM OF A CONVALESCENT."] God is always pretty near a sick woman's couch; but nearer even than God seems the sick-nurse--at least in that part of the country, under those circumstances. It is so good to look through the dimness and uncertainty, moral and physical, and to meet those little black, steadfast, all-seeing eyes; to feel those smooth, soft, all-soothing hands; to hear, across one's sleep, that three-footed step--the flat-soled left foot, the tiptoe right, and the padded end of the broomstick; and when one is so wakeful and restless and thought-driven, to have another's story given one. God, depend upon it, grows stories and lives as he does herbs, each with a mission of balm to some woe.