Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/256

 At night-time, when Firman's passionate southern nature lay under the thrall of his wife's beauty, she would whisper to him in her soft patois, "Love me well, my husband, for I have only you to love; others are jealous of my happiness, and even Jeanne-Marie is envious of your wife, and of the babe that is to come."

And the hot Spanish blood, that his mother had given him, would leap to Firman's face as he took her in his arms, and swore that all he loved, loved her; and those who angered her, he cared not for.

In the first year of their marriage, when Jeanne-Marie came almost every day, Suzanne would show her with pride all the changes and alterations in the old house. "See here, my sister," she said to her one day, only six months after the wedding, when she was taking her over the house, "this room that was yours, we have dismantled for the time; did it not seem a pity to keep an unused room all furnished, for the sun to tarnish, and the damp to spoil?" And Jeanne-Marie, as she looked round on the bare walls and the empty corners of the little room, where she and Catherine had slept together in the old days, answered quietly, "Quite true, Suzanne, quite true; it would be a great pity."

That night when she and Marthe sat together in the kitchen she told her of the incident.

"But, Jeanne-Marie," Marthe interrupted eagerly, "how was it you had left your furniture there, since it was yours?"

"How was it? But because little Catherine had slept in the old bed, and sat in the old chairs, and how could I take them away from the room?"

"Better that than let Suzanne break them up for firewood," Marthe replied shortly.

When little Henri was born, a year after the marriage, Suzanne would not let Jeanne-Marie be at the métairie, and she sent