When Honore Bontemps entered her cottage, he found her preparing the starch for the collars of the women villagers, and he said:  “Good-evening; I hope you are pretty well, Mother Rapet?”

She turned her head round to look at him, and said:  “As usual, as usual, and you?” “Oh! as for me, I am as well as I could wish, but my mother is not well.”  “Your mother?” “Yes, my mother!” “What is the matter with her?” “She is going to turn up her toes, that’s what’s the matter with her!”

The old woman took her hands out of the water and asked with sudden sympathy:  “Is she as bad as all that?” “The doctor says she will not last till morning.”  “Then she certainly is very bad!” Honore hesitated, for he wanted to make a few preparatory remarks before coming to his proposition; but as he could hit upon nothing, he made up his mind suddenly.

“How much will you ask to stay with her till the end?  You know that I am not rich, and I can not even afford to keep a servant girl.  It is just that which has brought my poor mother to this state—­too much worry and fatigue!  She did the work of ten, in spite of her ninety-two years.  You don’t find any made of that stuff nowadays!”

La Rapet answered gravely:  “There are two prices:  Forty sous by day and three francs by night for the rich, and twenty sous by day and forty by night for the others.  You shall pay me the twenty and forty.”  But the, peasant reflected, for he knew his mother well.  He knew how tenacious of life, how vigorous and unyielding she was, and she might last another week, in spite of the doctor’s opinion; and so he said resolutely:  “No, I would rather you would fix a price for the whole time until the end.  I will take my chance, one way or the other.  The doctor says she will die very soon.  If that happens, so much the better for you, and so much the worse for her, but if she holds out till to-morrow or longer, so much the better for her and so much the worse for you!”

The nurse looked at the man in astonishment, for she had never treated a death as a speculation, and she hesitated, tempted by the idea of the possible gain, but she suspected that he wanted to play her a trick.  “I can say nothing until I have seen your mother,” she replied.

“Then come with me and see her.”

She washed her hands, and went with him immediately.

They did not speak on the road; she walked with short, hasty steps, while he strode on with his long legs, as if he were crossing a brook at every step.

The cows lying down in the fields, overcome by the heat, raised their heads heavily and lowed feebly at the two passers-by, as if to ask them for some green grass.

When they got near the house, Honore Bontemps murmured:  “Suppose it is all over?” And his unconscious wish that it might be so showed itself in the sound of his voice.

But the old woman was not dead.  She was lying on her back, on her wretched bed, her hands covered with a purple cotton counterpane, horribly thin, knotty hands, like the claws of strange animals, like crabs, half closed by rheumatism, fatigue and the work of nearly a century which she had accomplished.