over a
final glass, climbed up on his big two-wheeled cart, and with a face of
dull crimson and a glazed eye, gathered up the reins and started swaying
in his seat for home. A boy carrying milk found him at daylight the next
morning lying face down in the track of his cart, dead, with a fractured
skull. Before another month had passed, the Mere Bourron had sold the
farm and gone to live with her sister--a lean woman who took in sewing.

Yvonne was free.

Free to work and to be married, and she did work with silent ferocity
from dawn until dark, washing the heavy coarse linen for a farm, and
scrubbing the milk-pans bright until often long after midnight--and
saved. Jean worked too, but mostly when he pleased, and had his hair
cut on fete days, most of which he spent in the cafe and saw Yvonne
during the odd moments when she was free.

Life over the blacksmith's shop, where she had taken a room, went
merrily for a while. Six months later--it is such an old story that it
is hardly worth the telling--but it was long after dark when she got
back from work and she found it lying on the table in her rough clean
little room--a scrap of paper beside some tiny worsted things she had
been knitting for weeks.

"I am not coming back," she read in an illiterate hand.

She would have screamed, but she could not breathe. She turned again,
staring at the paper and gripping the edge of the table with both
hands--then the ugly little room that smelt of singed hoofs rocked and
swam before her.

When she awoke she lay on the floor. The flame of the candle was
sputtering in its socket. After a while she crawled to her knees in the
dark; then, somehow, she got to her feet and groped her way to the
door, and down the narrow stairs out to the road. She felt the need of a
mother and turned toward Pont du Sable, keeping to the path at the side
of the wood like a homeless dog, not wishing to be observed. Every
little while, she was seized with violent trembling so that she was
obliged to stop--her whole body ached as if she had been beaten.

A sharp wind was whistling in from the sea and the night was so black
that the road bed was barely visible.

It was some time before she reached the beginning of Pont du Sable, and
turned down a forgotten path that ran back of the village by the marsh.
A light gleamed ahead--the lantern of a fishing-boat moored far out on
the slimy mud. She pushed on toward it, mistaking its position, in her
agony, f