“Men are so false!” she cried, as she went to bed.

Pierrette had given herself a frightful blow on the head, just above the ear, at the spot where young girls part their hair when they put their “front hair” in curlpapers.  The next day there was a large swelling.

“God has punished you,” said Sylvie at the breakfast table.  “You disobeyed me; you treated me with disrespect in leaving the room before I had finished my sentence; you got what you deserved.”

“Nevertheless,” said Rogron, “she ought to put on a compress of salt and water.”

“Oh, it is nothing at all, cousin,” said Pierrette.

The poor child had reached a point where even such a remark seemed to her a proof of kindness.

VIII

THE LOVES OF JACQUES AND PIERRETTE

The week ended as it had begun, in continual torture.  Sylvie grew ingenious, and found refinements of tyranny with almost savage cruelty; the red Indians might have taken a lesson from her.  Pierrette dared not complain of her vague sufferings, nor of the actual pains she now felt in her head.  The origin of her cousin’s present anger was the non-revelation of Brigaut’s arrival.  With Breton obstinacy Pierrette was determined to keep silence,—­a resolution that is perfectly explicable.  It is easy to see how her thoughts turned to Brigaut, fearing some danger for him if he were discovered, yet instinctively longing to have him near her, and happy in knowing he was in Provins.  What joy to have seen him!  That single glimpse was like the look an exile casts upon his country, or the martyr lifts to heaven, where his eyes, gifted with second-sight, can enter while flames consume his body.

Pierrette’s glance had been so thoroughly understood by the major’s son that, as he planed his planks or took his measures or joined his wood, he was working his brains to find out some way of communicating with her.  He ended by choosing the simplest of all schemes.  At a certain hour of the night Pierrette must lower a letter by a string from her window.  In the midst of the girl’s own sufferings, she too was sustained by the hope of being able to communicate with Brigaut.  The same desire was in both hearts; parted, they understood each other!  At every shock to her heart, every throb of pain in her head, Pierrette said to herself, “Brigaut is here!” and that thought enabled her to live without complaint.

One morning in the market, Brigaut, lying in wait, was able to get near her.  Though he saw her tremble and turn pale, like an autumn leaf about to flutter down, he did not lose his head, but quietly bought fruit of the market-woman with whom Sylvie was bargaining.  He found his chance of slipping a note to Pierrette, all the while joking the woman with the ease of a man accustomed to such manoeuvres; so cool was he in action, though the blood hummed in his ears and rushed boiling through his veins and arteries.  He had the firmness of a galley-slave without, and the shrinkings of innocence within him, —­like certain mothers in their moments of mortal trial, when held between two dangers, two catastrophes.