For three days more the weather was truly frightful.  The downpour burst over the trees with the awful clamour of an overflowing river.  Gusts of wind rolled by and beat against the windows with the violence of enormous waves.  Serge had insisted on Albine closing the shutters.  By lamplight he was no longer troubled by the gloom of the pallid curtains, he no longer felt the greyness of the sky glide in through the smallest chinks, and flow up to him like a cloud of dust intent on burying him.  However, increasing apathy crept upon him as he lay there with shrunken arms and pallid features; his weakness augmented as the earth grew more ailing.  At times, when the clouds were inky black, when the bending trees cracked, and the grass lay limp beneath the downpour like the hair of a drowned woman, he all but ceased to breathe, and seemed to be passing away, shattered by the hurricane.  But at the first gleam of light, at the tiniest speck of blue between two clouds, he breathed once more and drank in the soothing calm of the drying leaves, the whitening paths, the fields quaffing their last draught of water.  Albine now also longed for the sun; twenty times a day would she go to the window on the landing to scan the sky, delighted at the smallest scrap of white that she espied, but perturbed when she perceived any dusky, copper-tinted, hail-laden masses, and ever dreading lest some sable cloud should kill her dear patient.  She talked of sending for Doctor Pascal, but Serge would not have it.

‘To-morrow there will be sunlight on the curtains,’ he said, ’and then I shall be well again.’

One evening when his condition was most alarming, Albine again gave him her hand to rest his cheek upon.  But when she saw that it brought him no relief she wept to find herself powerless.  Since he had fallen into the lethargy of winter she had felt too weak to drag him unaided from the nightmare in which he was struggling.  She needed the assistance of spring.  She herself was fading away, her arms grew cold, her breath scant; she no longer knew how to breathe life into him.  For hours together she would roam about the spacious dismal room, and as she passed before the mirror and saw herself darkening in it, she thought she had become hideous.

One morning, however, as she raised his pillows, not daring to try again the broken spell of her hands, she fancied that she once more caught the first day’s smile on Serge’s lips.

‘Open the shutters,’ he said faintly.

She thought him still delirious, for only an hour previously she had seen but a gloomy sky on looking out from the landing.

‘Hush, go to sleep,’ she answered sadly; ’I have promised to wake you at the very first ray——­ Sleep on, there’s no sun out yet.’

‘Yes, I can feel it, its light is there. . . .  Open the shutters.’

III