f love, and he put his arms around her and clasped her gently, as
if she had been some little bird that he was afraid of hurting, but which
he did not wish to allow to escape.

She no longer knew what she was doing, but was in a state of entire
intense, supreme happiness. She shivered, and yet something burning
seemed to permeate her whole being under her skin, from the nape of her
neck to her feet, like a stream of burning spirit, and she would not have
had the strength to disengage herself or to take a step forward, so she
leant her head instinctively and very tenderly against Andre's shoulder.
He kissed her hair, touched her forehead with his lips, and at last put
them against hers. The girl felt as if she were going to die, and
remained inert and motionless, with her eyes full of tears.

He came nearly every evening for two months. She had not the courage to
repel him and to speak to him seriously of the future, and could not
understand why he had not yet asked her father for her hand and had not
fulfilled his former promises, until, one Sunday, as she was coming from
High Mass, walking on before her cousins, Marie-des-Anges heard the
following words, from a group in which Andre was standing, and he was
the speaker: "Oh! no," he said, "you are altogether mistaken; I should
never do anything so foolish.... One does not marry a girl without a
halfpenny; one takes her for one's mistress."

The unhappy girl mastered her feelings, went down the steps of the porch
quite steadily, but feeling utterly crushed, as if by the news of some
terrible disaster, and joined the servant, who was waiting for her, to
accompany her back to Boucau. The effects of what she had heard were to
give her a serious illness and for some time she hovered between life
and death, consumed and wasted by a violent fever; and when after a
fortnight's suffering, she grew convalescent, and looked at herself
in the glass, she recoiled, as if she had been face to face with an
apparition, for there was nothing left of her former self.

Her eyes were dull, her cheeks pale and hollow, and there were white
streaks in her silky, light hair. Why had she not succumbed to her
illness? Why had destiny reserved her for such a trial, and increased her
unhappy lot, that of disappointed hopes, thus? But when that rebellious
feeling was over, she accepted her cross, fell into a state of ardent
devotion and became crystallized in the torpor of an old woman, tried
wit