knitting in the cottage by a cheerless hearth, and as the supply of
potatoes, chestnuts and black bread grew scantier and scantier, would
furtively watch Antoine, with anxious, awe-struck glances, and then
would sometimes cross herself, and wipe a tear away unseen.

It was on a wild, stormy morning of January, that a letter at length
arrived for Antoine from Cherbourg. The news was blurted out with
tactless plainness. 'La pauvre petite' was no more. In proportion as she
grew calmer in mind, it appeared, Marie had grown weaker in body: and a
cold she had contracted soon after her arrival in Cherbourg, had settled
on her lungs, which were always delicate. For weeks she had not risen
from her bed, but had gradually pined away. There was a message for
Antoine. "Tell him," she had said, in one of her last intervals of
consciousness, "that I cannot bear to think of how I acted towards him.
Tell him I did not know what I was doing. Ask him to come--to come
quick. For I cannot die in peace, unless he forgives me." But she had
died before the message could be sent.

Antoine read the letter, crushed it in his great, trembling hand, and
looked round him as though searching blankly for the hostile power, that
had thus entangled, baffled and overthrown him. That voice from the
grave seemed to call on him to claim again the rights that had been
snatched from him. She was his, and he would see her face once more: he
would go to Cherbourg, and look on her dead face, that he might know it,
for she was his.

He would be in time, if he caught the night train (the funeral was the
following day). He would have to walk to St. Jean-du-Pied, the next
village along the coast, from which a _diligence_ started in the
afternoon to the nearest railway station. Old Aimée did up a little