she had herself already given
many proofs.

She fastened her horse to a tree and seated herself on a large rock,
letting her eyes rove over the broad expanse of barren plain, where
Nature seemed a step-mother,--feeling in her heart the same stirrings of
maternal love with which at times she gazed upon her infant. Prepared by
this train of emotion, these half involuntary meditations (which, to
use her own fine expression, winnowed her heart), to receive the
sublime instruction offered by the scene before her, she awoke from her
lethargy.

"I understood then," she said afterwards to the rector, "that our souls
must be ploughed and cultivated like the soil itself."

The vast expanse before her was lighted by a pale November sun. Already
a few gray clouds chased by a chilly wind were hurrying from the west.
It was then three o'clock. Veronique had taken more than four hours to
reach the summit, but, like all others who are harrowed by an inward
misery, she paid no heed to external circumstances. At this moment her
being was actually growing and magnifying with the sublime impetus of
Nature itself.

"Do not stay here any longer, madame," said a man, whose voice made her
quiver, "or you will soon be unable to return; you are six miles from
any dwelling, and the forest is impassable at night. But that is not
your greatest danger. Before long the cold on this summit will become
intense; the reason of this is unknown, but it has caused the death of
many persons."

Madame Graslin saw before her a man's face, almost black with sunburn,
in which shone eyes that were like two tongues of flame. On either side
of this face hung a mass of brown hair, and below it was a fan-shaped
beard. The man was raising respectfully one of those enormous
broad-brimmed hats which are worn by the peasantry of central France,
and in so doing displayed a bald but splendid forehead such as we
sometimes see in wayside beggars. Veronique did not feel the slightest
fear; the situation was one in which all the lesser considerations that
make a woman timid had ceased.

"Why are you here?" she asked.

"My home is near by," he answered.

"What can you do in such a desert?" she said.

"I live."

"But how? what means of living are there?"

"I earn a little something by watching that part of the forest," he
answered, pointing to the other side of the summit from the one that
overlooked Montegnac. Madame Graslin then saw the muzzle of a gun and
also