So deadly a whiteness overspread the girl's
face, that she turned from the hag to conceal it,
as she replied,

"So I hear."

"Well, you'll see it, no doubt, that'll be
better. Eugène Landry and you were great
friends, last year, I remember; everybody said
you were going to be married. But, alas! when
a girl's got nothing, lovers are shy, and they
say Mélie Prunier has not only a good dowry, but
will have all old Louis Prunier's savings. Oh,
it's a fine marriage for Eugène."

"A fine marriage," Jeanne repeated mechanically.
Happily, at that moment, the curé's voice
calling her, released her for the instant from her
torture, and when she had performed the
service for which she had been summoned, she
lingered about up-stairs till the old woman, tired
of waiting, took her departure.

At night, Jeanne went, solitary and sad, to her
bed: in the morning, when she went about her
work, she left an infant sleeping in it. What
she had gone through that night, none but God
and her own poor heart could tell.

"Jeanne! how dreadfully ill you look, my
girl!" the curé said, as he entered the kitchen.
"What is the matter?"

"I am not very well," she replied. " I was ill
in the night, and had bad dreams; but I am
much better now, monsieur; it's nothing—it will
all pass away."

M.Leroy paused, hesitated, sighed; he would
fain have sought her confidence, fain have
reassured him as to the suspicions that, never
occurring to himself, had lately been suggested
by village gossip. But Jeanne went to and
fro, bestirring herself in a way to make any
such opportunity difficult, and with a slow step
and anxious mind, the curé went out to tend
his roses.

Through the next three and four days the
subject still haunted him, but by degrees less
painfully and at longer intervals. Jeanne seemed
getting well again, and was, he fancied, less
preoccupied, less oppressed with some hidden
care than, despite all her efforts to conceal
the fact, she had lately been. He had had
some knowledge of Eugène Landry's former
attachment to her, and he now began to think
that it was Eugène's faithlessness alone that had
so weighed upon her mind.

On the sixth day from the wedding Jeanne
came to him with a troubled face. Her mother
was alarmingly ill; she had had a letter from a
neighbour, entreating that, if the curé could
spare her, she would lose no time in coming to
her. M. Leroy scanned the face before him—a
face whose colour went and came, and whose set
mouth and desperately beseeching eyes told all
that hung on his reply. He could not keep her
in that agony of suspense, he could not, by the
hint, even, of a perhaps unmerited suspicion,
further torture her; so he consented.

It was a distance of nearly five leagues to
Montrouge, the village where Jeanne's mother
resided, and there being only chance communications
between it and Auray-le-Clocher, she
had no means of getting there except on foot.
She was yet far from strong, and the weather
was hot; but, on the mission on which she was
going, solitude was wholly indispensable, and
this she could only secure by walking.

She had arranged with her cousin Pierrette
to take her place in the curé's household during
her absence; and now all things were prepared
for her departure, which was to take place
before even the early June dawn, that she might
get beyond the risk of recognition while Auray
and its neighbourhood was yet buried in sleep.

Strange, terrible, and yet crossed with gleams
of stormy sunshine, had been the experience of
those last few days to Jeanne. Happily her child
was a healthy and a quiet one, and passed most
of the hours of its first days in sleep. Still what
agonies of vigilance lest its occasional cries
should be heard, lest the frequency of her visits
to its hiding-place should be noticed, lest Claude
should, at any time, track her there unawares!
Yet, with all this, the passionate love she
had for the infant; the ecstasies of maternal
pride and tenderness that not all the shame,
and terror, and suffering of her situation could
smother, gave her moments she would have
purchased at almost any price; and though the
child's removal would put an end to this
perpetual state of anxious terror, she yet dreaded
the separation almost as much as she desired
the relief.

She had not confided her secret to any one;
though she had been forced tacitly to admit the
truth to her cousin Pierrette, who suspected it,
but who, after a few leading questions, had, in
pity, forborne to inquire further, and who did
not come to take her place till some hours after
her departure.

Before daylight, Jeanne, with her precious
burden sleeping in her arms, and a basket containing
the child's clothes and some little provision
for the journey, stole out of the presbytère, and
through the garden wicket, into the sleeping
village, whose length she had to traverse before
gaining the road to Montrouge.

The moon had set, and though some stars still
twinkled, the night was densely dark.
Trembling, listening, seeking to penetrate the
obscurity, she paused an instant before the church
to assure herself she was unobserved, ere she
fairly started on her way. At first all was dead
silence; then she fancied she heard—fancied she
saw— something, that had been crouching by the
white wall of the garden, near the gate, stir and
rise slowly. Like a deer that suddenly scents
its pursuers, she turned and fled, finding her
way through the dark street and over the rough
sharp stones rather by instinct than sight, stopping
not till the rapidity of her course had so
exhausted her breath that she was forced to
pause to regain it.

By this time she was well out in the open
country, and the dim line of the white road just
sufficiently visible to her eyes, accustomed to
the darkness, to secure her against the danger
of losing her way. Then she began to feel a
little reassured, and to try to reason away her