Soon after this the dark world began to lighten faintly, and with the rising of a little white mist, like a veil rolling upwards, I at last saw the river and the fields beyond.  To see anything at all lightened my heart a little, and I turned homeward when this faint daylight appeared.  When I got back into the street, I found that the people at last were stirring.  They had all a look of half panic, half shame upon their faces.  Many were yawning and stretching themselves.  ’Good morning, M. le Maire,’ said one and another; ‘you are early astir.’  ’Not so early either,’ I said; and then they added, almost every individual, with a look of shame, ’We were so late this morning; we overslept ourselves—­like yesterday.  The weather is extraordinary.’  This was repeated to me by all kinds of people.  They were half frightened, and they were ashamed.  Pere Laserques was sitting moaning on the Cathedral steps.  Such a thing had never happened before.  He had not rung the bell for early mass; he had not opened the Cathedral; he had not called M. le Cure.  ‘I think I must be going out of my senses,’ he said; ’but then, M. le Maire, the weather!  Did anyone ever see such weather?  I think there must be some evil brewing.  It is not for nothing that the seasons change—­that winter comes in the midst of summer.’

After this I went home.  My mother came running to one door when I entered, and my wife to another. ‘O mon fils!’ and ‘O mon ami!’ they said, rushing upon me.  They wept, these dear women.  I could not at first prevail upon them to tell me what was the matter.  At last they confessed that they believed something to have happened to me, in punishment for the wrong done to the Sisters at the hospital.  ’Make haste, my son, to amend this error,’ my mother cried, ‘lest a worse thing befall us!’ And then I discovered that among the women, and among many of the poor people, it had come to be believed that the darkness was a curse upon us for what we had done in respect to the hospital.  This roused me to indignation.  ’If they think I am to be driven from my duty by their magic,’ I cried; ‘it is no better than witchcraft!’ not that I believed for a moment that it was they who had done it.  My wife wept, and my mother became angry with me; but when a thing is duty, it is neither wife nor mother who will move me out of my way.

It was a miserable day.  There was not light enough to see anything—­scarcely to see each other’s faces; and to add to our alarm, some travellers arriving by the diligence (we are still three leagues from a railway, while that miserable little place, La Rochette, being the chef-lieu, has a terminus) informed me that the darkness only existed in Semur and the neighbourhood, and that within a distance of three miles the sun was shining.  The sun was shining! was it possible? it seemed so long since we had seen the sunshine; but this made our calamity more mysterious and more terrible.  The people began to gather