"I want to thank you and love you all my life," she answered, "for you have kept your word to me; you have brought my father and my brother back to me safe and sound, and I know that all that you have done, all that has happened to you, is because you loved them and loved me. Therefore I am here to nurse you and not to leave you as long as you are ill." "Ah, that's good, Thérence!" I said, sighing; "it is more than I deserve. Please God not to let me get well, for I don't know what would become of me afterwards." "Afterwards?" said Père Bastien, coming into the room with Huriel and Brulette. "Come, daughter, what shall we do with him afterwards?" "Afterwards?" said Thérence, blushing scarlet for the first time. "Yes, Thérence the Sincere," returned her father, "speak as becomes a girl who never lies." "Well, father, then afterwards, I will never leave him, either," she said. "Go away, all of you!" I cried; "close the curtains; I want to get up and dress and dance and sing. I'm not ill; I have paradise inside of me--" and so saying I fell back in a faint, and saw and knew nothing more, except that I felt, in a kind of a dream, that Thérence was holding me in her arms and giving me remedies. In the evening I felt better; Joseph was already about, and I might have been, too, only they wouldn't let me; and I was made to spend the evening in bed, while the rest sat and talked in the room, and my Thérence, sitting by my pillow, listened tenderly to what I said, letting me pour out in words all the balm that was in my heart. The monk talked with Benoît, the pair washing down their conversation with several jorums of white wine, which they swallowed under the guise of a restorative medicine. Huriel and Brulette were together in a corner; Joseph with his mother and the Head-Woodsman in another. Huriel was saying to Brulette: "I told you, the very first day I saw you, when I showed you your token in my earring, that it should stay there forever unless the ear itself came off. Well, the ear, though slit in the fight, is still there, and the token, though rather bent, is in the ear--see! The wound will heal, the token can be mended, and everything will come all right, by the grace of God." Mariton was saying to Père Bastien: "What is going to be the result of this fight? Those men are capable of murdering my poor boy if he attempts to play his bagpipe in this region."