Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/253

 old Dubois, even Jeanne the voisine, is gone. I alone am left, and the good God knows if there will be any to cry for me when my turn comes to go." She shut the old Mass-book, and put it carefully back on the shelf, and she went to the old looking-glass and the tanned wrinkled face met its reflection very calmly and patiently. "I think it was the hard work in the fields when I was young," she said; "certainly Marthe was right. It is the face of an old woman, a face more worn than hers, though she is beyond forty and has borne so many children."

Firman had urged his sister to stay on at the métairie after his marriage. "You should not go, it is not natural," he said one evening a few weeks before his wedding, while they were piling the small wood in the shed. "The old house will not be the old house without you. Suzanne wishes it also. Parbleu! Is it the custom for the fathers to turn their sons out, when they marry? Then, why should I let the old sister go, now my time for marrying has come? Suzanne is a good girl and pretty; and has never even looked at any young fellow in the village—for I, as you know, am particular, and I like not the manners in some villages, where a girl's modesty is counted nothing—but blood is worth the most, ma foi, as the old father used to say; and badly must he think of me to see the old sister making room even for the little Suzanne."

But Jeanne-Marie shook her head. "I cannot well explain it, Firman," she said. "It's not that your Suzanne comes unwelcome to me—no, the good God knows it's not that—but it would be