To crown the misfortune, Annette, entirely absorbed in the child's illness, had not opened her correspondence for several weeks. She had not replied to the letters of the mortgage-holders or the court summons that followed. It was during the days of the child's relapse. Annette had lost her head. Not realizing that they were addressed to her and not to her agent, she sent the papers off without reading them to the lawyer, who did not read them either--for a good reason. He was on the run. When at last the recovery of her child left her mind free enough to examine the situation, the judicial procedure had advanced so far that, in Annette's failure to satisfy the demands of the creditors, the latter had won the right to have the mortgaged property put up for sale. Annette, awakened from her torpor, had to face this stunning blow; with the energy that was restored in an instant and the practical intelligence, inherited from her father, that made up for her inexperience, she fought with a vigor and a clearness of mind which the judge admired even while he decided against her: for her good excuses did not alter the fact that before the law her case was bad. Annette herself saw at once that she had lost in advance, but her fighting instinct, which coolly admitted her defeat, unjust as it was, could not admit it without resistance. Besides, she was concerned now for her child's property. She defended it, step by step, with the tenacity of a rude, shrewd peasant who, bracing her legs at the gate of her field, bars the road to intruders, trying to gain time even though she knows they are coming in. But what could she do? In her inability to pay the sum that was demanded, and not wishing to ask aid from her relatives or from the old friends who would probably have refused it in some humiliating way, she could not stop the sale. Her ingenious, stubborn energy only succeeded in obtaining the suspension, for a limited time, of the proceedings of expropriation, without any hope of preventing their execution after a brief delay.