e she opened her mouth wide as though she had
been a long time without breathing, and her serious face looked a
little less anxious for a moment. I ran past her, went into the room
to fetch my cloak, and went straight out to the pens. The sheep rushed
out, tumbling over one another. They ought to have been in the fields
a long time before.

All day long I thought over what the farmer had said to me. I could
not understand why the Mother Superior wanted to prevent me from seeing
Sister Marie-Aimee. I understood that Sister Marie-Aimee could do
nothing though, and I made my mind up to wait, thinking that a day
would come when nobody could prevent me from seeing her again. At
bedtime the farmer's wife went up with me to put an extra blanket on my
bed, and when she had said "good night," she told me not to call her
"madame" any more. She wanted me to call her Pauline. Then she went
away, after telling me that both she and her husband looked upon me as
a child of the house, and that she would do all she could to make me
happy at the farm.

Next day Master Silvain made me sit next to his brother at table. He
told him with a laugh that he was not to let me want for anything,
because he wanted me to grow. The farmer's brother was called Eugene.
He spoke very little, but he always looked at each person who spoke,
and his little eyes often seemed to be laughing at them. He was thirty
years old, but he did not look more than twenty. He always had an
answer to any question he was asked, and I felt no awkwardness at
sitting next to him. He squeezed himself against the wall so as to
give me more room at the table, and when the farmer told him to look
after me, all he said was, "You need not worry."

Now, after all the fields had been ploughed Martine took her sheep a
long way off to some pasture land called the common. The cowherd and I
took our flock down the meadows and into the woods where there was
fern. I suffered from the cold although I had a big woollen cloak
which covered me down to my feet. The cowherd often had to light a
fire. He would bake potatoes and chestnuts in the ashes and share them
with me. He taught me how to know from which side the wind was coming,
so as to make use of the least shelter against the cold. And as we sat
over the fire and tried to keep ourselves warm he would sing me a song
about "Water and Wine." It was a song which had about twenty verses in
it. Water and Wine accu