Page:A Leaf in the Storm.djvu/258

 a plot of ground, and a pig, and a small orchard. She was well-to-do, and could leave it all to Bernadou; and for ten years she had been happy, perfectly happy, in the coolness, and the sweetness and the old familiar ways and habits of the Berceau.

Bernadou was very good to her.

The lad, as she called him, was five-and-twenty years old, tall and straight and clean-limbed, with the blue eyes of the North, and a gentle frank face. He worked early and late in the plot of ground that gave him his livelihood. He lived with his grandmother, and tended her with a gracious courtesy and veneration that never altered. He was not very wise; he also could neither read nor write,- he believed in his priest and his homestead, and loved the ground that he had trodden ever since his first steps from the cradle had been guided by Reine Allix.

He had never been drawn for the conscription, because he was the only support of a woman of ninety: he, likewise, had never been half-a-dozen kilometres from his birth-place.

When he was bidden to vote, and he asked what his vote of assent would pledge him to, they told him,—

"It will bind you to honour your grandmother so long as she shall live, and to get up with the