The next day, again, Henriette said upon her return at evening: 

“‘Poor boy’ is dead.”  She could not keep back her tears at mention of his name.  “If you could but have seen and heard him in his pitiful delirium!  He kept calling me:  ‘Mamma! mamma!’ and stretched his poor thin arms out to me so entreatingly that I had to take him on my lap.  His suffering had so wasted him that he was no heavier than a boy of ten, poor fellow.  And I held and soothed him, so that he might die in peace; yes, I held him in my arms, I whom he called his mother and who was but a few years older than himself.  He wept, and I myself could not restrain my tears; you can see I am weeping still—­” Her utterance was choked with sobs; she had to pause.  “Before his death he murmured several times the name which he had given himself:  ’Poor boy, poor boy!’ Ah, how just the designation! poor boys they are indeed, some of them so young and all so brave, whom your hateful war maims and mangles and causes to suffer so before they are laid away at last in their narrow bed!”

Never a day passed now but Henriette came in at night in this anguished state, caused by some new death, and the suffering of others had the effect of bringing them together even more closely still during the sorrowful hours that they spent, secluded from all the world, in the silent, tranquil chamber.  And yet those hours were full of sweetness, too, for affection, a feeling which they believed to be a brother’s and sister’s love, had sprung up in those two hearts which little by little had come to know each other’s worth.  To him, with his observant, thoughtful nature, their long intimacy had proved an elevating influence, while she, noting his unfailing kindness of heart and evenness of temper, had ceased to remember that he was one of the lowly of the earth and had been a tiller of the soil before he became a soldier.  Their understanding was perfect; they made a very good couple, as Silvine said with her grave smile.  There was never the least embarrassment between them; when she dressed his leg the calm serenity that dwelt in the eyes of both was undisturbed.  Always attired in black, in her widow’s garments, it seemed almost as if she had ceased to be a woman.

But during those long afternoons when Jean was left to himself he could not help giving way to speculation.  The sentiment he experienced for his friend was one of boundless gratitude, a sort of religious reverence, which would have made him repel the idea of love as if it were a sort of sacrilege.  And yet he told himself that had he had a wife like her, so gentle, so loving, so helpful, his life would have been an earthly paradise.  His great misfortune, his unhappy marriage, the evil years he had spent at Rognes, his wife’s tragic end, all the sad past, arose before him with a softened feeling of regret, with an undefined hope for the future, but without distinct purpose to try another effort to master happiness.  He closed