For at least a month I was drawn to and fro between rage and relief; while the whole village split its sides laughing at me, and sometimes, when the thought of Belette came over me I could have dashed my head against the wall. Fortunately such feelings do not last; we are not meant to die for love, but to live by it; and then you do not often find a hero of romance in Burgundy; life is too sweet to us for that; and since our permission was not asked before we were born, we feel that we may as well make the best of it now that we are here. We need the world, or the world needs us, I was never quite sure which; but at all events we always hold on till the last gasp, draining every drop of the cup, and when it is empty, we can fill it up again from our bounteous hillsides. No native of Burgundy is in a hurry to die; but when it comes to suffering, we can bear it as well as the best. Well, for as much as six months, I was deucedly unhappy; but time flows along, and sweeps our sorrows away with it. Now that it is all over, I can find consolation, but oh, my Belette! if only I had not missed you!--and that pig-faced miller, with his flour bags! to think that all these years she has belonged to him!--thirty years ago he married her! They tell me that he began to neglect her almost from the first day, (he was just the kind of animal that bolts his food, and so gets no flavor out of it); and they say too that he would not have married her at all, if Pinon had not caught him that night, and forced him, so to speak, into a wedding ring, which was too tight for him and her too; for when things were not to his liking, he naturally took it out of his wife. So there was an end of one, two and three, Pinon, Belette, and poor old Breugnon, who has been trying, ever since, to make a joke of it.... I could scarcely believe my eyes when at a turn in the path, I saw her house not twenty yards away; was it possible that I had been walking for hours among those old memories? There was the red roof, and the white walls of the cottage, half covered with the rich foliage of a grapevine, its thick stem winding upwards like a serpent. The door stood open; before it in the shade of a walnut tree was a stone trough running over with clear water. A woman was stooping over it and my knees gave way under me when I saw her again after all these years. My first impulse was to run, but she had seen me, and as she dipped her pail in the trough she still kept her eyes on me, and I felt that she knew who I was, though she was far too proud to show it. The next moment the bucket slipped from her fingers as she straightened herself up, and then she called out, “Better late than never!” “That sounds as if you had been waiting for me!” “What an idea! I don’t believe that I have given you one thought in twenty years.” “Nor I either,” said I, “but all the same, it does me good to see you.”