Abbe Mouret smiled as he glanced at his sister.  ‘Yes, yes,’ he murmured; ‘she gets on famously, she grows fatter every day.’

‘That’s because I eat,’ said Desiree.  ’If you would eat you would get fat, too.  Are you ill again?  You look very melancholy.  I don’t want to have it all over again, you know.  I was so very lonely when they took you away to cure you.’

‘She is right,’ said La Teuse.  ’You don’t behave reasonably, Monsieur le Cure.  You can’t expect to be strong, living, as you do, on two or three crumbs a day, as though you were a bird.  You don’t make blood; and that’s why you are so pale.  Don’t you feel ashamed of keeping as thin as a lath when we are so fat; we who are only women?  People will begin to think that we gobble up everything and leave you nothing but the empty plates.’

Then both La Teuse and Desiree, brimful of health and strength, scolded him affectionately.  His eyes seemed very large and bright, but empty, expressionless.  He was still gently smiling.

‘I am not ill,’ he said; ‘I have nearly finished my milk.’  He had swallowed two mouthfuls of it, but had not touched the bread.

‘The animals, now,’ said Desiree, thoughtfully, ’seem to get on much more comfortably than we do.  The fowls never have headaches, have they?  The rabbits grow as fat as ever one wants them to be.  And you never saw my pig looking sad.’

Then, turning towards her brother, she went on with an air of rapture: 

’I have named it Matthew, because it is so like that fat man who brings the letters.  It is growing so big and strong.  It is very unkind of you to refuse to come and look at it as you always do.  You will come to see it some day, won’t you?’

While she was thus talking she had laid hold of her brother’s share of bread, and was eating away at it.  She had already finished one piece, and was beginning the second, when La Teuse became aware of what she was doing.

’That doesn’t belong to you, that bread!  You are actually stealing his food from him now!’

‘Let her have it,’ said Abbe Mouret, gently.  ’I shouldn’t have touched it myself.  Eat it all, my dear, eat it all.’

For a moment Desiree fell into confusion, with her eyes fixed upon the bread, whilst she struggled to check her rising tears.  Then she began to laugh, and finished the slice.

‘My cow,’ said she, continuing her remarks, ’is never as sad as you are.  You were not here when uncle Pascal gave her to me, on the promise that I would be a good girl, or you would have seen how pleased she was when I kissed her for the first time.’

She paused to listen.  A cock crowed in the yard, and a great uproar followed, with flapping of wings and cackling, grunting, and hoarse cries as if the whole yard were in a state of commotion.

‘Ah! you know,’ resumed Desiree, clapping her hands, ’she must be in calf now.  I took her to the bull at Beage, three leagues from here.  There are very few bulls hereabouts, you know.’