portrait inclined over the invalid and seemed
to gaze sternly at her. It represented a man with harsh features, whose
face emerged from the high collar of a green satin coat, and a muslin
cravat, with waving ends, tied loosely around the neck, in the style of
the early years of the Revolution. The old woman in the bed resembled
the portrait. She had the same bushy, commanding black eyebrows, the
same aquiline nose, the same clearly marked lines of will, resolution
and energy. The portrait seemed to cast a reflection upon her, as a
father's face is reflected in his child's. But in hers the harshness of
the features was softened by a gleam of rough kindliness, by an
indefinable flame of sturdy devotion and masculine charity.

The light in the room was the light of an evening in early spring, about
five o'clock, a light as clear as crystal and as white as silver, the
cold, chaste, soft light, which fades away in the flush of the sunset
passing into twilight. The sky was filled with that light of a new life,
adorably melancholy, like the still naked earth, and so replete with
pathos that it moves happy souls to tears.

"Well, well! my silly Germinie, weeping?" said the old woman, a moment
later, withdrawing her hands which were moist with her maid's kisses.

"Oh! my dear, kind mademoiselle, I would like to weep like this all the
time! it's so good! it brings my poor mother back before my eyes--and
everything!--if you only knew!"

"Go on, go on," said her mistress, closing her eyes to listen, "tell me
about it."

"Oh! my poor mother!" The maid paused a moment. Then, with the flood of
words that gushes forth with tears of joy, she continued, as if, in the
emotion and outpouring of her happiness, her whole childhood flowed back
into her heart! "Poor woman! I can see her now the last time she went
out to take me to mass, one 21st of January, I remember. In those days
they read from the king's Testament. Ah! she suffered enough on my
account, did mamma! She was forty-two years old, when I was born----papa
made her cry a good deal! There were three of us before and there wasn't
any too much bread in the house. And then he was proud as anything. If
we'd had only a handful of peas in the house he would never have gone to
the cure for help. Ah! we didn't eat bacon every day at our house. Never
mind; for all that mamma loved me a little more and she always found a
little fat or cheese in some corner to put on my bread. I wasn't