Sosthene and Chaouache looked at each other triumphantly, smiled, and swore two simultaneous oaths of admiration. Zosephine softly pinched her mother, and whispered something. Madame Sosthene addressed the home-comer aloud: "Did 'Thanase send no other message except that mere 'How-d'ye all do?'" "No." Zosephine leaned upon her mother's shoulder, and softly breathed: "He is lying." The mother looked around upon her daughter in astonishment. The flash of scorn was just disappearing from the girl's eyes. She gave a little smile and chuckle, and murmured, with her glance upon the man: "He has no leave of absence. He is a deserter." Then Madame Sosthene saw two things at once: that the guess was a good one, and that Zosephine had bidden childhood a final "adjieu." The daughter felt Bonaventure's eyes upon her. He was standing only a step or two away. She gave him a quick, tender look that thrilled him from head to foot, then lifted her brows and made a grimace of pretended weariness. She was growing prettier almost from day to day. And Bonaventure, he had no playmates--no comrades--no amusements. This one thing, which no one knew but the cure, had taken possession of him. The priest sometimes seemed to himself cruel, so well did it please him to observe the magnitude Bonaventure plainly attributed to the matter. The boy seemed almost physically to bow under the burden of his sense of guilt. "It is quickening all his faculties," said the cure to himself. Zosephine had hardly yet learned to read without stammering, when Bonaventure was already devouring the few French works of the cure's small bookshelf. Silent on other subjects, on one he would talk till a pink spot glowed on either cheek-bone and his blue eyes shone like a hot noon sky;--casuistry. He would debate the right and wrong of any thing, every thing, and the rights and wrongs of men in every relation of life. Blessed was it for him then that the tactful cure was his father and mother in one, and the surgeon and physician of his mind. Thus the struggle brought him light. To the boy's own eyes it seemed to be bringing him only darkness, but the priest saw better. "That is but his shadow; he is standing in it; it is deepening; that shows the light is increasing." Thus spake the cure to himself as he sat at solitaire under his orange-tree one afternoon. The boy passed out of sight, and the cure's eyes returned to his game of solitaire; but as he slowly laid one card upon another, now here, now there, he still thought of Bonaventure.