“Will you allow me, dear Countess?  I am afraid of taking cold and having neuralgia.”

“Oh, yes,” the Countess replied.

She sat down on a hay-stack, mowed that morning in order to give a clear field to the players, and, her heart suddenly touched with sadness, looked on at the game.

Her daughter, irritated at losing continually, grew more animated, excited, uttered cries of vexation or of triumph, and flew impetuously from one end of the court to the other.  Often, in her swift movements, little locks of hair were loosened, rolled down and fell upon her shoulders.  She seized them with impatient movements, and, holding the racket between her knees, fastened them up in place, thrusting hairpins into the golden mass.

And Bertin, from his position, cried to the Countess: 

“Isn’t she pretty like that, and fresh as the day?”

Yes, she was young, she could run, grow warm, become red, let her hair fly, brave anything, dare everything, for all that only made her more beautiful.

Then, when they resumed their play with ardor, the Countess, more and more melancholy, felt that Olivier preferred that game, that childish sport, like the play of kittens jumping after paper balls, to the sweetness of sitting beside her that warm morning, and feeling her loving pressure against him.

When the bell, far away, rang the first signal for breakfast, it seemed to her that someone had freed her, that a weight had been lifted from her heart.  But as she returned, leaning on his arm, he said to her: 

“I have been amusing myself like a boy.  It is a great thing to be, or to feel oneself, young.  Ah, yes, there is nothing like that.  When we do not like to run any more, it is all over with us.”

When they left the table the Countess, who on the preceding day had for the first time omitted her daily visit to the cemetery, proposed that they should go there together; so all three set out for the village.

They were obliged to go through some woods, through which ran a stream called “La Rainette,” no doubt because of the frogs that peopled it; then they had to cross the end of a plain before arriving at the church, situated in the midst of a group of houses that sheltered the grocer, the baker, the butcher, the wine-merchant, and several other modest tradesmen who supplied the needs of the peasants.

The walk was made in thoughtful silence, the recollection of the dead weighing on their spirits.  Arrived at the grave, the women knelt and prayed a long time.  The Countess, motionless, bent low, her handkerchief at her eyes, for she feared to weep lest her tears run down her cheeks.  She prayed, but not as she had prayed before this day, in a sort of invocation to her mother, a despairing appeal penetrating under the marble of the tomb until she seemed to feel by the poignancy of her own anguish that the dead must hear her, listen to her, but a simple, hesitating,