As she spoke Pierrette struck her head against the door of the passage which some one had left open. “Good! I’m glad of it,” cried Sylvie, as they heard the blow. “She must be hurt,” said Desfondrilles. “She deserves it,” replied Sylvie. “It was a bad blow,” said Mademoiselle Habert. Sylvie thought she might escape paying her _misere_ if she went to see after Pierrette, but Madame de Chargeboeuf stopped her. “Pay us first,” she said, laughing; “you will forget it when you come back.” The remark, based on the old maid’s trickery and her bad faith in paying her debts at cards was approved by the others. Sylvie sat down and thought no more of Pierrette,--an indifference which surprised no one. When the game was over, about half past nine o’clock, she flung herself into an easy chair at the corner of the fireplace and did not even rise as her guests departed. The colonel was torturing her; she did not know what to think of him. “Men are so false!” she cried, as she went to bed. Pierrette had given herself a frightful blow on the head, just above the ear, at the spot where young girls part their hair when they put their “front hair” in curlpapers. The next day there was a large swelling. “God has punished you,” said Sylvie at the breakfast table. “You disobeyed me; you treated me with disrespect in leaving the room before I had finished my sentence; you got what you deserved.” “Nevertheless,” said Rogron, “she ought to put on a compress of salt and water.” “Oh, it is nothing at all, cousin,” said Pierrette. The poor child had reached a point where even such a remark seemed to her a proof of kindness. VIII. THE LOVES OF JACQUES AND PIERRETTE The week ended as it had begun, in continual torture. Sylvie grew ingenious, and found refinements of tyranny with almost savage cruelty; the red Indians might have taken a lesson from her. Pierrette dared not complain of her vague sufferings, nor of the actual pains she now felt in her head. The origin of her cousin’s present anger was the non-revelation of Brigaut’s arrival. With Breton obstinacy Pierrette was determined to keep silence,--a resolution that is perfectly explicable. It is easy to see how her thoughts turned to Brigaut, fearing some danger for him if he were discovered, yet instinctively longing to have him near her, and happy in knowing he was in Provins. What joy to have seen him! That single glimpse was like the look an exile casts upon his country, or the martyr lifts to heaven, where his eyes, gifted with second-sight, can enter while flames consume his body.