"'Now tell me the whole story--not your suffering, nor his--I see that in your faces--but how it could all happen. The last time you talked to me we were girls together--we are girls now.' "'Madame la marquise,' she began, 'I----' "'No, not madame la marquise,' I interrupted, taking her hand in mine; 'just one woman talking to another. Whose fault was it--yours or Henri's?' "'Neither. They lied about him; they said he would never come back; then, when he did not write and no news came of him and I was wild and crazy with grief, they told me more things of which I won't speak; and one of the old women in the village, who wanted him for her granddaughter, laughed and said the things were true and that she didn't mind, and nobody else should; and then all the time my father was saying I must marry the other'--and she pointed in the direction of the cripple--'and he kept coming every day, and was kind and sympathetic, and good to me I must say, and is now, and at last my heart was worn out--and they took me to the church, and it was all over. And then the next month Henri came back from Algiers, where he had been ill in the hospital, and came straight here and sat down in that chair over there, and looked about him, and then he said: "I would not have come home if I had known how things were; I would rather have been shot. I cannot give you all this"--and he pointed to the furniture--"and you did not want them when we first loved each other." "'And then he told me how many times he had written, and we hunted through my father's chest which I had brought here with me--he had died that year, and so had my dear mother--and there we found all Henri's letters tied together with a string, and not one of them opened.' "'What did you do?' I asked. "'I went at once to my husband and told him everything. He burst into a great rage; and the two had hard words, and then the next day he was out in the field and the sun was very hot, and he was brought home, and has been as you see him ever since.' "'And where is Henri?' "'He is here on the farm. When the doctor gave my husband no hope of ever being well again, my husband sent for him and begged Henri's pardon for what he had said, saying he wanted no one to hate him now that he could not live; that all Henri had done was to love me as a man should love a woman, and that, if I would be willing, Henri should take care of the farm and keep it for me. This was four years ago, and Henri is still here and my husband has never changed. When the weather is good, Henri puts him in his chair, the one we bought in Rouen, and wheels him about under the apple-trees, and every night he comes in and sits beside him and goes over the accounts and tells him of the day's work. Then he goes back home, six kilometres away, to his mother's, where he lives.'"