"`He is getting better, they say,' observed the woman nodding her head in his direction. `The doctor looked in yesterday--he had been up at the Chateau to see the little lord. Yes, he says Jean is getting better, and with good food he might be fit for something again,' she added in a hard, indifferent tone, as if she did not much care. "`And will they not send some to _him_--they--up at the Chateau?' said Marguerite, indignantly. `They know how the accident happened; it was in saving my lord's haystacks; but for him every one says they would all have been burnt.' "The woman gave a short, bitter laugh. "`On the other hand, as the bailiff says,' she replied, `we should be overwhelmed with gratitude that Jean has not been accused of setting fire to them. You know what _that_ would have meant,' and she passed her hand round her neck with an expressive gesture, for in those days a much smaller crime than that of incendiarism--or even, alas! in most cases, the _suspicion_ of such a crime--was too surely punished by hanging, and hanging sometimes preceded by tortures too frightful to tell you of, and followed by hideous insult to the poor, dead body, adding untold horror to the misery of the victim's friends, even after he could no longer suffer. `There is one cause for thankfulness,' Jean's wife went on,--I have called her an old woman, but she was, in reality, barely forty, though you would have taken her for fully twenty years more--`and that is that he and I are now alone to bear it. The fever has been our best friend after all.' "`Yes,' said Marguerite simply, `your children with my mother and little Angele--they are all at rest and happy in heaven.' "`But how can there be a heaven--how can there be a God, if He lets us suffer so horribly? Suffer till there is no _good_, no gentleness, no pity left in us, my girl. There are times when I feel as if the devil were in me, when I would enjoy the sight of _their_ suffering, they who treat us worse than their dogs--dogs indeed! see my lady's little pampered poodles! if we were treated like their dogs we need not complain--when I would not have a drop of pity in my heart, however I saw them tortured,' and Madelon's face, in its thin misery, took an expression which made Marguerite shiver, so that the elder woman, thinking it was from cold, drew her nearer to the fire, which she stirred with her foot. "`I should not talk so to you, poor child. Now tell me your troubles. Is it about Louis?' "`Partly, and about everything. Last night, Madelon, quite late, that horrible Martin, the bailiff's son, came down again, sent by his father about the rent. He said if we had not yet got it ready, Louis must either pay the fine or do extra work. You know we have not got it ready--how could we? And then--I think he had been drinking--he began teasing me. He said I was a pretty girl, in spite of my rags;--they are poor enough, Madelon, but they are not rags; I do my best to mend them.'