“He is in the hands of his Creator,” he answered; “we can know nothing till I have seen him.  We cannot call back the past.”

“Ought I not to go with you?” I asked.

“Wherefore, my child?”

“He is my husband,” I said, falteringly; “if he is ill, I will nurse him.”

“Good! my poor child,” he replied, “leave all this affair to me; leave even thy duty to me.  I will take care there shall be no failure in it, on thy part.”

We were not many minutes over our frugal breakfast of bread-and-milk, and then we set out together, for he gave me permission to go with him, until we came within sight of the factory and the cottage.  We walked quickly and in foreboding silence.  He told me, as soon as he saw the place, that I might stay on the spot where he left me, till the church-clock struck eight; and then, if he had not returned to me, I must go back to the village, and send Jean with the char a bancs.  I sat down on the felled trunk of a tree, and watched him, in his old threadbare cassock, and sunburnt hat, crossing the baked, cracked soil of the court, till he reached the door, and turned round to lift his hat to me with a kindly gesture of farewell.  He fitted the key into the lock, passed out of my sight; but I could not withdraw my eyes from the deep, thatched eaves, and glossy fleur-de-lis growing along the roof.

How interminable seemed his absence!  I sat so still that the crickets and grasshoppers in the tufted grass about me kept up their ceaseless chirruping, and leaped about my feet, unaware that I could crush their merry life out of them by a single movement.  The birds in the dusky branches overhead whistled their wild wood-notes, as gayly as if no one were near their haunts.  Now and then there came a pause, when the silence deepened until I could hear the cones, in the fir-trees close at hand, snapping open their polished scales, and setting free the winged seeds, which fluttered softly down to the ground.  The rustle of a swiftly—­gliding snake through the fallen leaves caught my ear, and I saw the blunted head and glittering eyes lifted up to look at me for a moment; but I did not stir.  All my fear and feeling, my whole life, were centred upon the fever-cottage yonder.

There was not the faintest line of smoke from the chimney, when we first came in sight of it.  Was it not quite possible that Pierre might have been mistaken?  And if he had made a mistake in thinking he saw smoke this morning, why not last night also?  Yet the cure was lingering there too long for it to be merely an empty place.  Something detained him, or why did he not come back to me?  Presently a thin blue smoke curled upward into the still air.  Monsieur Laurentie was kindling a fire on the hearth. He was there then.

What would be the end of it all?  My heart contracted, and my spirit shrank from the answer that was ready to flash upon my mind.  I refused to think of the end.  If Richard were ill, why, I would nurse him, as I should have nursed him if he had always been tender and true to me.  That at least was a clear duty.  What lay beyond that need not be decided upon now.  Monsieur Laurentie would tell me what I ought to do.