f Veronique from Soeur
Marthe. During the days when the child's danger reached a crisis, the
neighbors and passers saw, for the first and only time in Sauviat's
life, tears in his eyes and rolling down his hollow cheeks; he did
not wipe them, but stood for hours as if stupefied, not daring to go
upstairs to his daughter's room, gazing before him and seeing nothing,
so oblivious of all things that any one might have robbed him.

Veronique was saved, but her beauty perished. Her face, once exquisitely
colored with a tint in which brown and rose were harmoniously mingled,
came out from the disease with a myriad of pits which thickened the
skin, the flesh beneath it being deeply indented. Even her forehead did
not escape the ravages of the scourge; it turned brown and looked as
though it were hammered, like metal. Nothing can be more discordant
than brick tones of the skin surrounded by golden hair; they destroy all
harmony. These fissures in the tissues, capriciously hollowed, injured
the purity of the profile and the delicacy of the lines of the face,
especially that of the nose, the Grecian form of which was lost, and
that of the chin, once as exquisitely rounded as a piece of white
porcelain. The disease left nothing unharmed except the parts it was
unable to reach,--the eyes and the teeth. She did not, however, lose the
elegance and beauty of her shape,--neither the fulness of its lines nor
the grace and suppleness of her waist. At fifteen Veronique was still a
fine girl, and to the great consolation of her father and mother, a good
and pious girl, busy, industrious, and domestic.

After her convalescence and after she had made her first communion,
her parents gave her the two chambers on the second floor for her own
particular dwelling. Sauviat, so course in his way of living for himself
and his wife, now had certain perceptions of what comfort might be; a
vague idea came to him of consoling his child for her great loss, which,
as yet, she did not comprehend. The deprivation of that beauty which was
once the pride and joy of those two beings made Veronique the more dear
and precious to them. Sauviat came home one day, bearing a carpet he
had chanced upon in some of his rounds, which he nailed himself on
Veronique's floor. For her he saved from the sale of an old chateau
the gorgeous bed of a fine lady, upholstered in red silk damask, with
curtains and chairs of the same rich stuff. He furnished her two
rooms with ant