He passed his evenings at her bedside.  The Abbe, on the other hand, came regularly every second day.  Jeanne retained them with her as long as possible, and displayed vexation when she saw them take up their hats.  Her immediate dread lay in being left alone with her mother and the doctor, and she would fain have always had company in the room to keep these two apart.  Frequently, without reason, she called Rosalie to her.  When they were alone with her, her eyes never quitted them, but pursued them into every corner of the bedroom.  Whenever their hands came together, her face grew ashy white.  If a whispered word was exchanged between them, she started up in anger, demanding to know what had been said.  It was a grievance to her that her mother’s gown should sweep against the doctor’s foot.  They could not approach or look at one another without the child falling immediately into violent trembling.  The extreme sensitiveness of her innocent little being induced in her an exasperation which would suddenly prompt her to turn round, should she guess that they were smiling at one another behind her.  She could divine the times when their love was at its height by the atmosphere wafted around her.  It was then that her gloom became deeper, and her agonies were those of nervous women at the approach of a terrible storm.

Every one about Helene now looked on Jeanne as saved, and she herself had slowly come to recognize this as a certainty.  Thus it happened that Jeanne’s fits were at last regarded by her as the bad humors of a spoilt child, and as of little or no consequence.  A craving to live sprang up within her after the six weeks of anguish which she had just spent.  Her daughter was now well able to dispense with her care for hours; and for her, who had so long become unconscious of life, these hours opened up a vista of delight, of peace, and pleasure.  She rummaged in her drawers, and made joyous discoveries of forgotten things; she plunged into all sorts of petty tasks, in the endeavor to resume the happy course of her daily existence.  And in this upwelling of life her love expanded, and the society of Henri was the reward she allowed herself for the intensity of her past sufferings.  In the shelter of that room they deemed themselves beyond the world’s ken, and every hindrance in their path was forgotten.  The child, to whom their love had proved a terror, alone remained a bar between them.

Jeanne became, indeed, a veritable scourge to their affections.  An ever-present barrier, with her eyes constantly upon them, she compelled them to maintain a continued restraint, an affectation of indifference, with the result that their hearts were stirred with even greater motion than before.  For days they could not exchange a word; they knew intuitively that she was listening even when she was seemingly wrapped in slumber.  One evening, when Helene had quitted the room with Henri, to escort him to the front door, Jeanne burst out with the cry, “Mamma! mamma!”