ld have pushed her away even then, for she was slight and
small; but the pains came upon me, and with a sob choking my voice I
lost all knowledge.

I am told that I lay for more than a month between life and death,
now burning with fever and now in the cold fit; and that but for the
tendance which never failed nor faltered, nor could have been outdone
had my malady been the least infectious in the world. I must have died
a hundred times, as hundreds round me did die week by week in that year.
From the first they took me out of the house (where I think I should
have perished quickly, so impregnated was it with the plague poison) and
laid me under a screen of boughs in the forest, with a vast quantity of
cloaks and horse-cloths cunningly disposed to windward. Here I ran some
risk from cold and exposure and the fall of heavy dews; but, on the
other hand, had all the airs of heaven to clear away the humours and
expel the fever from my brain.

Hence it was that when the first feeble beginnings of consciousness
awoke in me again, they and the light stole in on me through green
leaves, and overhanging boughs, and the freshness and verdure of the
spring woods. The sunshine which reached my watery eyes was softened by
its passage through great trees, which grew and expanded as I gazed
up into them, until each became a verdant world, with all a world's
diversity of life. Grown tired of this, I had still long avenues
of shade, carpeted with flowers, to peer into; or a little wooded
bottom--where the ground fell away on one side--that blazed and burned
with redthorn. Ay, and hence it was that the first sounds I heard, when
the fever left me at last, and I knew morning from evening, and man from
woman, were the songs of birds calling to their mates.

Mademoiselle and Madame de Bruhl, with Fanchette and Simon Fleix, lay
all this time in such shelter as could be raised for them where I lay;
M. Francois and three stout fellows, whom Maignan left to guard us
living in a hut within hail. Maignan himself, after seeing out a week of
my illness, had perforce returned to his master, and no news had since
been received from him. Thanks to the timely move into the woods, no
other of the party fell ill, and by the time I was able to stand and
speak the ravages of the disease had so greatly decreased that fear was
at an end.

I should waste words were I to try to describe how the peace and
quietude of the life we led in the forest during the