But I was worn out myself with anxiety and watching.  For three or four days I was ill with a low, nervous fever—­altogether unlike the terrible typhoid, yet such as to keep me to my room.  Minima and Mademoiselle Therese were my only companions.  Mademoiselle, after talking that one night as much as she generally talked in twelve months, had relapsed into deeper taciturnity than before.  But her muteness tranquillized me.  Minima’s simple talk brought me back to the level of common life.  My own nervous weeping, which I could not control, served to soothe me.  My casement, almost covered by broad, clustering vine-leaves, preserved a cool, dim obscurity in my room.  The village children seemed all at once to have forgotten how to scream and shout, and no sound from the street disturbed me.  Even the morning and evening bell rang with a deep, muffled tone, which scarcely stirred the silence.  I heard afterward that Jean had swathed the bell in a piece of sackcloth, and that the children had been sent off early every morning into the woods.

But I could not remain long in that idle seclusion.  I felt all my strength returning, both of body and mind.  I began to smile at Minima, and to answer her childish prattle, with none of the feeling of utter weariness which had at first prostrated me.

“Are we going to stay here forever and ever?” she asked me, one day, when I felt that the solitary peace of my own chamber was growing too monotonous for me.

“Should you like to stay, Minima?” I inquired in reply.  It was a question I must face, that of what I was going to do in the future.

“I don’t know altogether,” she said, reflectively.  “The boys here are not so nice as they used to be at home.  Pierre says I’m a little pagan, and that’s not nice, Aunt Nelly.  He says I must be baptized by Monsieur Laurentie, and be prepared for my first communion, before I can be as good as he is.  The boys at home used to think me quite as good as them, and better.  I asked Monsieur Laurentie if I ought to be baptized over again, and he only smiled, and said I must be as good a little girl as I could be, and it did not much matter.  But Pierre, and all the rest, think I’m not as good as them, and I don’t like it.”

I could not help laughing, like Monsieur Laurentie, at Minima’s distress.  Yet it was not without foundation.  Here we were heretics amid the orthodox, and I felt it myself.  Though Monsieur le Cure never alluded to it in the most distant manner, there was a difference between us and the simple village-folk in Ville-en-bois which would always mark us as strangers in blood and creed.