Page:Middle Aged Love Stories (IA middleagedlove00bacorich).djvu/180

 ly a day during that long winter sickness, when she would have died if left alone to her nervous melancholy, that he did not bring home some flower or bit of fruit. She guessed later what meagre lunches had made their purchase possible. One of his pupils would have taken him South for the winter vacation, but he had refused and stayed with her. And the cold tried him so.

"I shall never forget this, monsieur," she had said, when she found it out; she had not thought to be able to repay that quiet sacrifice.

How sweetly, how sympathetically he had listened to her plans; how he had helped, suggested, advised, admired, and congratulated! The very pattern of her travelling-dress, the marking of her trunk—and he sick for home, dying in a foreign land!

"C'est terrible, n'est-ce pas, Mlle. Sabine?"

What was it, that strange pain that