When he joined his fiancée, he did not feel all that he ordinarily felt--a joyful impulse to run to meet her, a sort of oppression at the pit of the stomach, a sudden delicious rush of the blood to the throbbing heart!--And Livette, too, so soon, was conscious of a vague inexplicable feeling at the bottom of her heart that something was wrong. There was something between them! Indeed, he had, for the first time, something to conceal from her; and, thinking that it might, that it must be apparent, he suddenly said: "I am not well to-night." "Look out for the fever!" said Audiffret. "I know it is not as frequent or as dangerous as it used to be, but you must be on your guard, all the same! Be on your guard, and take the remedy. Up in the pharmacy of the château are the registers of the time the land was first exploited--the time when the Château d'Avignon people were gaining a little arable land from the swamps every day. Why, men went to the hospital, fifteen, twenty a day. And such doses of quinine, my children! It is all written down in the _Livre de Raison_ up there. In those days, all the farms hereabout had the same kind of a book, called by the same name, just as sailors have a log-book. Those were the days of good order and gallantry. The peasant-women in those days didn't try to copy Parisian bourgeoises,--eh, grandmamma?--by wearing dresses that didn't suit them, instead of the old-fashioned gowns that made them attractive because they were so becoming." "Yes," sighed the grandmother, "this is the age of pride, and my time has gone by." That is the common remark of all our old peasants. "People didn't read so many newspapers in those days," continued Audiffret, "they didn't worry so much about the affairs of the whole world, and every man paid much more attention to his own affairs. Things went better for it. Landowners lived on their estates and raised families, instead of going to Paris and dying there, of pride or debt or something else. The _Livre de Raison_ up yonder describes our ancestors' battles with the swamps and the fever. The pharmacy is still in good order, with the scales and the jars in the pigeon-holes, under the dust. And the book tells everything, diseases and deaths. To-day, hardly any one dies of the fever in our neighborhood. It is dying out. The dikes and canals have done good service, and this Cochin China of France, as that sailor called it that I took to see the Giraud rice-fields, this Camargue of ours is as healthy to-day as Crau!--However, be on your guard, I tell you, and take the remedy! don't wait till to-morrow; Livette will give you what you need. Now, I am going to bed. Stay up a little longer, young people, if you choose. Are you coming, grandma?" "No, I'll stay out a moment longer with the young folks," said the old woman. Audiffret knocked the ashes out of his pipe against the corner of the bench, and having put it in his pocket, went up to bed. Silence reigned upon the bench.