I learned afterward that the girl to whom the bed belonged had died the day before, during the cure’s absence, and was going to be buried that morning, in a cemetery lying in a field on the side of the valley.  Mademoiselle Therese was making up the bed with homespun linen, scented with rosemary and lavender, and the cure laid Minima down upon it with all the skill of a woman.  In this home-like ward I took up my work as nurse.

It was work that seemed to come naturally to me, as if I had a special gift for it.  I remembered how some of the older shepherds on the station at home used to praise my mother’s skill as a nurse.  I felt as if I knew by instinct the wants of my little patients, when they could not put them into coherent words for themselves.  They were mostly children, or quite young girls; for the older people who were stricken by the fever generally clung to their own homes, and the cure visited them there with the regularity of a physician.  I liked to find for these suffering children a more comfortable position when they were weary; or to bathe their burning heads with some cool lotion; or to give the parched lips the titane Mademoiselle Therese prepared.  Even the delirium of these little creatures was but a babbling about playthings, and fetes, and games.  Minima, whose fever took faster hold of her day after day, prattled of the same things in English, only with sad alternations of moaning over our poverty.

It was probably these lamentations of Minima which made me sometimes look forward with dread to the time when this season of my life should be ended.  I knew it could be only for a little while, an interlude, a brief, passing term, which must run quickly to its conclusion, and bring me face to face again with the terrible poverty which the child bemoaned in words no one could understand but myself.  Already my own appearance was changing, as Mademoiselle Therese supplied the place of my clothing, which wore out with my constant work, replacing it with the homely costume of the Norman village.  I could not expect to remain here when my task was done.  The presbytery was too poor to offer me a shelter when I could be nothing but a burden in it.  This good cure, who was growing fonder of me every day, and whom I had learned to love and honor, could not be a father to me as he was to his own people.  Sooner or later there would come an hour when we must say adieu to one another, and I must go out once again to confront the uncertain future.

But for the present these fears were very much in the background, and I only felt that they were lurking there, ready for any moment of depression.  I was kept too busy with the duties of the hour to attend to them.  Some of the children died, and I grieved over them; some recovered sufficiently to be removed to a farm on the brow of the hill, where the air was fresher than in the valley.  There was plenty to do and to think of from day to day.