Doctor Dalichamp had clambered into his gig and was calling to Maurice.  The young man threw all his heart and soul into the embrace he gave his sister Henriette, who, pale as death in her black mourning garments, looked on his face in silence through her tears.

“He whom I leave to your care is my brother.  Watch over him, love him as I love him!”

IV.

Jean’s chamber was a large room, with floor of brick and whitewashed walls, that had once done duty as a store-room for the fruit grown on the farm.  A faint, pleasant odor of pears and apples lingered there still, and for furniture there was an iron bedstead, a pine table and two chairs, to say nothing of a huge old walnut clothes-press, tremendously deep and wide, that looked as if it might hold an army.  A lazy, restful quiet reigned there all day long, broken only by the deadened sounds that came from the adjacent stables, the faint lowing of the cattle, the occasional thud of a hoof upon the earthen floor.  The window, which had a southern aspect, let in a flood of cheerful sunlight; all the view it afforded was a bit of hillside and a wheat field, edged by a little wood.  And this mysterious chamber was so well hidden from prying eyes that never a one in all the world would have suspected its existence.

As it was to be her kingdom, Henriette constituted herself lawmaker from the beginning.  The regulation was that no one save she and the doctor should have access to Jean; this in order to avert suspicion.  Silvine, even, was never to set foot in the room unless by direction.  Early each morning the two women came in and put things to rights, and after that, all the long day, the door was as impenetrable as if it had been a wall of stone.  And thus it was that Jean found himself suddenly secluded from the world, after many weeks of tumultuous activity, seeing no face save that of the gentle woman whose footfall on the floor gave back no sound.  She appeared to him, as he had beheld her for the first time down yonder in Sedan, like an apparition, with her somewhat large mouth, her delicate, small features, her hair the hue of ripened grain, hovering about his bedside and ministering to his wants with an air of infinite goodness.

The patient’s fever was so violent during the first few days that Henriette scarce ever left him.  Doctor Dalichamp dropped in every morning on his way to the hospital and examined and dressed the wound.  As the ball had passed out, after breaking the tibia, he was surprised that the case presented no better aspect; he feared there was a splinter of the bone remaining there that he had not succeeded in finding with the probe, and that might make resection necessary.  He mentioned the matter to Jean, but the young man could not endure the thought of an operation that would leave him with one leg shorter than the other and lame him permanently.  No, no! he would rather die than be a cripple for life.  So the good doctor,