darned stocking-heels at the ends of their slowly-clicking sabots, and the beautiful view of snowy Alps and purple Jura at either end of the little street.  The day was brilliant; early spring was in the air and in the sunshine, and the winter’s damp was trickling out of the cottage eaves.  It was birth and brightness for all nature, even for chirping chickens and waddling goslings, and it was to be death and burial for poor, foolish, generous, delightful Bellegarde.  Newman walked as far as the village church, and went into the small grave-yard beside it, where he sat down and looked at the awkward tablets which were planted around.  They were all sordid and hideous, and Newman could feel nothing but the hardness and coldness of death.  He got up and came back to the inn, where he found M. Ledoux having coffee and a cigarette at a little green table which he had caused to be carried into the small garden.  Newman, learning that the doctor was still sitting with Valentin, asked M. Ledoux if he might not be allowed to relieve him; he had a great desire to be useful to his poor friend.  This was easily arranged; the doctor was very glad to go to bed.  He was a youthful and rather jaunty practitioner, but he had a clever face, and the ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole; Newman listened attentively to the instructions he gave him before retiring, and took mechanically from his hand a small volume which the surgeon recommended as a help to wakefulness, and which turned out to be an old copy of “Faublas.”  Valentin was still lying with his eyes closed, and there was no visible change in his condition.  Newman sat down near him, and for a long time narrowly watched him.  Then his eyes wandered away with his thoughts upon his own situation, and rested upon the chain of the Alps, disclosed by the drawing of the scant white cotton curtain of the window, through which the sunshine passed and lay in squares upon the red-tiled floor.  He tried to interweave his reflections with hope, but he only half succeeded.  What had happened to him seemed to have, in its violence and audacity, the force of a real calamity—­the strength and insolence of Destiny herself.  It was unnatural and monstrous, and he had no arms against it.  At last a sound struck upon the stillness, and he heard Valentin’s voice.

“It can’t be about me you are pulling that long face!” He found, when he turned, that Valentin was lying in the same position; but his eyes were open, and he was even trying to smile.  It was with a very slender strength that he returned the pressure of Newman’s hand.  “I have been watching you for a quarter of an hour,” Valentin went on; “you have been looking as black as thunder.  You are greatly disgusted with me, I see.  Well, of course!  So am I!”

“Oh, I shall not scold you,” said Newman.  “I feel too badly.  And how are you getting on?”

“Oh, I’m getting off!  They have quite settled that; haven’t they?”

“That’s for you to settle; you can get well if you try,” said Newman, with resolute cheerfulness.