Moreover, it was useless to try to deceive Jeanne.  Her senses had become wondrously acute.  The Abbe and Monsieur Rambaud paid a visit every night; they sat down and spent an hour in sad silence.  One evening, as the doctor was going away, Helene signed to Monsieur Rambaud to take his place and clasp the little one’s hand, so that she might not notice the departure of her beloved friend.  But two or three minutes had scarcely passed ere Jeanne opened her eyes and quickly drew her hand away.  With tears flowing she declared that they were behaving ill to her.

“Don’t you love me any longer? won’t you have me beside you?” asked poor Monsieur Rambaud, with tears in his eyes.

She looked at him, deigning no reply; it seemed as if her heart was set on knowing him no more.  The worthy man, grievously pained, returned to his corner.  He always ended by thus gliding into a window-recess, where, half hidden behind a curtain, he would remain during the evening, in a stupor of grief, his eyes the while never quitting the sufferer.  The Abbe was there as well, with his large head and pallid face showing above his scraggy shoulders.  He concealed his tears by blowing his nose loudly from time to time.  The danger in which he saw his little friend lying wrought such havoc within him that his poor were for the time wholly forgotten.

But it was useless for the two brothers to retire to the other end of the room; Jeanne was still conscious of their presence.  They were a source of vexation to her, and she would turn round with a harassed look, even though drowsy with fever.  Her mother bent over her to catch the words trembling on her lips.

“Oh! mamma, I feel so ill.  All this is choking me; send everybody away —­quick, quick!”

Helene with the utmost gentleness then explained to the two brothers the child’s wish to fall asleep; they understood her meaning, and quitted the room with drooping heads.  And no sooner had they gone than Jeanne breathed with greater freedom, cast a glance round the chamber, and once more fixed a look of infinite tenderness on her mother and the doctor.

“Good-night,” she whispered; “I feel well again; stay beside me.”

For three weeks she thus kept them by her side.  Henri had at first paid two visits each day, but soon he spent the whole night with them, giving every hour he could spare to the child.  At the outset he had feared it was a case of typhoid fever; but so contradictory were the symptoms that he soon felt himself involved in perplexity.  There was no doubt he was confronted by a disease of the chlorosis type, presenting the greatest difficulty in treatment, with the possibility of very dangerous complications, as the child was almost on the threshold of womanhood.  He dreaded first a lesion of the heart and then the setting in of consumption.  Jeanne’s nervous excitement, wholly beyond his control, was a special source of uneasiness; to such heights of delirium