atisfy my heart. I have always been fond of you, and now I am so
in love with you that if you should ask me to spend my life fulfilling
your thousand wishes, I would swear on the spot to do it. Pray, pray,
see how I love you and forget my age! Just think what a false idea it is
that people have that a man of thirty is old. Besides, I am only
twenty-eight! a girl is afraid of being criticised for taking a man ten
or twelve years older than she is, because it isn't the custom of the
province; but I have heard that in other places they don't think about
that; on the other hand, they prefer to give a young girl, for her
support, a sober-minded man and one whose courage has been put to the
test, rather than a young fellow who may go wrong, and turn out to be a
bad lot instead of the nice boy he is supposed to be. And then, too,
years don't always make age. That depends on a man's health and
strength. When a man is worn out by overwork and poverty, or by evil
living, he is old before he's twenty-five. While I--But you're not
listening to me, Marie."

"Yes, I am, Germain, I hear what you say," replied little Marie; "but I
am thinking of what my mother has always told me: that a woman of sixty
is much to be pitied when her husband is seventy or seventy-five and
can't work any longer to support her. He grows infirm, and she must take
care of him at an age when she herself is beginning to have great need
of care and rest. That is how people come to end their lives in the
gutter."

"Parents are right to say that, I agree, Marie," said Germain; "but,
after all, they would sacrifice the whole of youth, which is the best
part of life, to provide against what may happen at an age when one has
ceased to be good for anything, and when one is indifferent about ending
his life in one way or another. But I am in no danger of dying of hunger
in my old age. I am in a fair way to save up something, because, living
as I do with my wife's people, I work hard and spend nothing. Besides, I
will love you so well, you know, that that will prevent me from growing
old. They say that when a man's happy he retains his youth, and I feel
that I am younger than Bastien just from loving you; for he doesn't love
you, he's too stupid, too much of a child to understand how pretty and
good you are, and made to be courted. Come, Marie, don't hate me, I am
not a bad man; I made my Catherine happy; she said before God, on her
death-bed, that she had never been a