When the post-chaise drew up before the door with the baron's smiling face looking out of the window, Jeanne felt fonder of her parents and more pleased to see them than she had ever been before; but when she saw her mother she was overcome with surprise and grief. The baroness looked ten years older than when she had left Les Peuples six months before. Her huge, flabby cheeks were suffused with blood, her eyes had a glazed look, and she could not move a step unless she was supported on either side; she drew her breath with so much difficulty that only to hear her made everyone around her draw theirs painfully also. The baron, who had lived with her and seen her every day, had not noticed the gradual change in his wife, and if she had complained or said her breathing and the heavy feeling about her heart were getting worse, he had answered: "Oh, no, my dear. You have always been like this." Jeanne went to her own room and cried bitterly when she had taken her parents upstairs. Then she went to her father and, throwing herself in his arms, said, with her eyes still full of tears: "Oh, how changed mother is! What is the matter with her? Do tell me what is the matter with her?" "Do you think she is changed?" asked the baron in surprise. "It must be your fancy. You know I have been with her all this time, and to me she seems just the same as she has always been; she is not any worse." "Your mother is in a bad way," said Julien to his wife that evening. "I don't think she's good for much now." Jeanne burst into tears. "Oh, good gracious!" went on Julien irritably. "I don't say that she is dangerously ill. You always see so much more than is meant. She is changed, that's all; it's only natural she should begin to break up at her age." In a week Jeanne had got accustomed to her mother's altered appearance and thought no more about it, thrusting her fears from her, as people always do put aside their fears and cares, with an instinctive and natural, though selfish dislike of anything unpleasant. The baroness, unable to walk, only went out for about half an hour every day. When she had gone once up and down "her" avenue, she could not move another step and asked to sit down on "her" seat. Some days she could not walk even to the end of the avenue, and would say: "Let us stop; my hypertrophy is too much for me to-day." She never laughed as she used to; things which, the year before, would have sent her into fits of laughter, only brought a faint smile to her lips now. Her eyesight was still excellent, and she passed her time in reading _Corinne_ and Lamartine's _Meditations_ over again, and in going through her "Souvenir-drawer." She would empty on her knees the old letters, which were so dear to her heart, place the drawer on a chair beside her, look slowly over each "relic," and then put it back in its place. When she was quite alone she kissed some of the letters as she might have kissed the hair of some loved one who was dead.