That was four and a half years ago, and it was a very lonely four and a half years at the white cottage. Even the cooking, when it was for herself alone, became uninteresting, and the zest went out of it. Jeanne-Marie, in her loneliness, hungered for the animal life that had unconsciously formed a great part of her existence at the _métairie_. Every springtime she would sit, sometimes for hours, in her garden, watching the flocks of callow geese, as they wandered along the road in front of the mill, pecking at the ground as they went, and uttering all the time their little plaintive cries, that soothed her with its echo of the old home. When the boys in their bérets, with their long poles and their loud cries of “guà, guà,” drove the cows and the oxen home from the fields at sunset, Jeanne-Marie would come out of her cottage, and watch the patient, sleek beasts, as they dawdled along. And she would think longingly of the evenings at the _métairie_, when she never missed going out to see the oxen, as they lay contentedly on their prickly bedding, moving their heavy jaws slowly up and down, too lazy even to look up as she entered. Firman loved his oxen, for they were well trained and strong, and did good work; but Jeanne-Marie would have laughed in those days, had she been told she loved the animals of the farm. “I remember,” she said to Marthe of the mill one day, “how I said to the old father years ago: ‘When the children of M. François came to the _métairie_, it is--“Oh, Jeanne-Marie, you will not kill that pretty little grey hen with the feathered legs,” and “Oh! Jeanne-Marie, you must not drown so many kittens this time”: but I say to them always: “My children, the rich have their toys and have the time and money to make toys of their animals; but to us poor folk they are the useful creatures God has given us for food and work, and they are not playthings.”’ So I said then; but now, ah, now Marthe, it is different. Do you remember how old Dubois for ever quarrelled with young Baptiste, but when they wrote from the regiment to tell him the boy was dead of fever, during the great manœuvres, do you remember how the old father mourned, and lay on his bed for a whole day, fasting? So it always is, Marthe. The cow butts the calf with her horns, but when the calf is gone, the mother moans for it all the day.” Firman was too busy with his farm and his new family ties to come much to see his sister, or to notice how rarely she came up to the _métairie_ now. For Suzanne had never forgiven, and that was why Jeanne-Marie walked up so seldom to M. François’s _métairie_.