One afternoon she dragged herself, on foot and alone, along the road to Saint-Gingolph, between the brook, the fields, and the hillock that separates two valleys. The weather was fine, underfoot were leaves of plane-trees, some decaying, others rolling along the ground, driven by the autumn wind. She had not the courage to go to the farm; the orchard came down to the roadside. She sat down upon the grass of the ditch and reflected that this was the third autumn that she had been there, since the war! She recalled to mind the first one, when people were beginning to find the hostilities very long; when every evening, passing by the post-office, one hoped to read the news of some event which would bring about its sudden end. She thought of the little soldiers whom she used to follow to the cemetery, and of whom every one insisted upon thinking: "He is the last one!" Before her, on the crest of the hillock, like a fantastic screen whose edge has been clumsily cut by a child, a long avenue of very ancient elms broke in upon the view. They bore scattered clusters of foliage, still golden; a dense cloud of crows rose up and lighted with sinister croakings upon their ragged tops. These birds with their lugubrious cries seemed about to give battle for the possession of a notable charnel-house. And suddenly they plunged into the branches and disappeared, and nothing remained of them but the wound inflicted by the rasping voices upon the motionless air. Then the black cloud uprose again, as if the avenue of old elms, mown down at the roots by shells, had upheaved itself before its final downfall. It seemed as if the heart of the hillock were painfully throbbing. The raucous croaking of these thousands of birds grated upon her nerves and aroused all her powers of mournful revery. Odette resumed her walk back to the town. Evening was falling. Lush meadows along the brookside, a gray steeple almost hidden in foliage of rose ochre, the racecourse--relic of a brilliant worldliness--two or three pretty villas, whose reddening hopvines were flaunting themselves derisively before closed windows, reminded her too painfully of a past era--a lost paradise. Among the persons whom she met, already half hidden in the shadow, some were laughing. Then people could laugh? Why, yes! Life, diverse as it is, has ever its source in the waters of a Fountain of Youth. The darkness and the croakings of the crows haunted her. When she reached the cottage she threw herself upon a divan, and remained there, overcome, until Amelia came to call her to her solitary dinner.