"She had the stamp of death on her face when she went away," said the
labourer's wife, "as surely as it was on him that she left. I told her
she had no strength for the journey; but she would go: there was no
moving her from that. She had rich friends _la-bas_, who might help her
husband. It was for that she went. That thought seemed to give her a kind
of fever, and the strength of fever."
"And there has come no letter--nothing?"
"Nothing, mademoiselle."
On this Cydalise determined to return to Beaubocage. She could not well
leave the child longer on the hands of these friendly people, even by
paying for his maintenance, which she insisted on doing, though they
would fain have shared their humble _pot-a-feu_ and coarse loaf with
him unrecompensed. She determined on a desperate step. She would take
her brother's orphan child back with her, and leave the rest to
Providence--to the chance of some sudden awakening of natural affection
in a heart that had long languished in a kind of torpor that was almost
death.
The little fellow pined sadly for those dear familiar faces, those tender
soothing voices, that had vanished so suddenly from his life. But the
voice of his aunt was very sweet and tender, and had a tone that recalled
the father who was gone. With this kind aunt he left Rouen in the
lumbering old vehicle that plied daily betwixt that city and Vevinord.
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