“If I am pale, Firman, it is not for worrying over Suzanne. Tell her from me, I have been selfish all this time. I will not be so again. When she can spare the little Henri, she shall send him to play here with me, by Anna.” Anna was Suzanne’s sixteen-year-old sister, who lived almost entirely at the _métairie_ since her sister’s marriage. “And every Sunday afternoon I will come up, and will sit with him in the garden as I used to do. Tell this to Suzanne, with my love.” And Firman told her; and mingled with the relief that Suzanne felt, that the face and figure which had become like a nightmare to her strained nerves, would appear only once a week at the farm, was gratitude that her sister had taken things so well. “Anna shall take him every other day,” she observed to Firman, “she shall see I am not jealous; it was the pain that took me suddenly yesterday, while you were speaking. For that matter, in the afternoon there is always much for me to do, and little Henri can very well go with Anna to the cottage.” And no doubt she meant to keep her promise, but she was occupied mind and body with other things. The second baby would be born in a month, and in the afternoons, when she sat, languid and tired, she liked to have her sister Anna by her, and Henri playing by her side. And after little Catherine was born, there was much for Anna to do. “I could not well spare her if I would,” Suzanne would say to herself; “what with two babies and me so long in getting on my feet this time.” And Jeanne-Marie put on the clean white bodice every day before her dinner, and sat in the little garden with her eyes fixed on the turning in the white road that led to M. François’s _métairie_, but it was not more than one day a week that Anna would come in sight, with little Henri in her arms. The other days Jeanne-Marie would sit, shading her eyes and watching, till long after the hour when she could expect them to appear. At first, after the quarrel, she had believed in Suzanne’s reiterated assurances that “Anna would come every other day or so,” and many were the wasted afternoons of disappointment that she courted in her little garden. Sometimes she would rise to her feet, and a sudden impulse to go up to the farm, not a mile away, if only to kiss _le petit_ and come home again, laid hold of her; but the memory of Suzanne’s cold looks of surprise, and the “Is anything wrong, Jeanne-Marie?” that would meet her, was sufficient to force her into her chair again with a little hopeless sigh. “When the calf is gone, the mother mourns for it all the day,” Marthe said grimly, when she surprised her one day watching the white turning. But Jeanne-Marie answered her miserably: “Ah, but I never butt at my calf, and they have taken it from me all the same.”