The afternoon waned slowly, and the little group at the café increased in numbers, as the men sauntered through the village at sundown. The women stood at their doors, laughing and chatting with one another. M. le Curé passed down the street, smiling at the children. From the meadows came the cows and oxen, driven slowly along, their bells beating low harmonies as they went. The festive air of evening after a hot day touched all the tiny town. And Jeanne-Marie stood in her garden, waiting. Suddenly, while she watched, her heart bounded within her, and a spasm of sudden pain drove the colour from her face, for she recognised the figure that was passing from the white turning into the broad road. Suzanne--Suzanne, who had not been near her cottage for a year--Suzanne, alone. She pressed her two hands under her left breast, and moved forward to the gate. She felt now she had known it for long. All the suspense of many days had given way to a dull certainty: little Henri was ill, was dying perhaps, and Suzanne had come with the news. Jeanne-Marie had her hand on the latch to let her through; but she stood outside the gate, and said hoarsely, “I will not come in.” Her face was flushed, there was no cap over her coil of brown hair, and she had on the dark dress she never wore except at the farm. All this Jeanne-Marie noticed mechanically, while that suffocating hurry at her heart seemed to eat away her energy and her power of speech. But Suzanne was going to speak. The colour flamed into her face, and her teeth ground together, as if to force down the violence of her feeling, and then she spoke: “Jeanne-Marie, you have done your work well. We knew you loved our boy. You were careful always to show us how far greater was your love for him than ours. And as you could not well turn him against me before my eyes, you waited--_ma foi_, how well you did it!--you waited till I was well away, and then, you taught him to sneak down to see you, and sneak home again before my return. _Mon Dieu!_ it was a worthy son to us you wished to make of him. But it could not be, Jeanne-Marie. Your good God, you love so well, would not have it and so;”--there came a sob in her voice that she choked down, and Jeanne-Marie’s face went a shade greyer as she listened--“it happened that I was long at the market last week, and you, knowing this would be so, because it was a big market, brought him home late, when the fever was springing from the marshes--it was Marguerite Vallée saw him and came and told me--and now these four days he has lain with fever, and the officier de santé tells us there grows something in his throat that may kill him in four days.”