Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/259

 able pitch. To her jealous imagination it had seemed for some time that the boy clung more to her sister than to her, and one day things reached a climax.

Jeanne-Marie had arrived with a toy bought for three sous from a travelling pedlar, and the child had screamed, and cried, because his mother, alleging that he was tired, refused to allow Jeanne-Marie to take him or show him the toy. The boy screamed louder and louder, and Jeanne-Marie sat, silent and troubled, in her corner. Even Firman, who was yoking his oxen in the yard, came in hurriedly, hearing the noise, and finding nothing wrong, pleaded with his wife. "Mais, voyons, Suzanne," he began, persuasively, "if le petit wants to see his toy, la tante may show it him, n'est ce pas?" And Suzanne, unable to bear it any longer, almost threw her child into Jeanne-Marie's lap, bursting out, "Take him, then, and draw my baby's love from me, as you please. I want no child who hates his mother." And sobbing loudly, she rushed out. Firman followed her, his handsome face puckered with perplexity, and Jeanne-Marie and the baby were left alone. She bent low down over the deep Spanish eyes that were so like her own, and, while her tears dropped on his face, she held him to her feverishly. "Adieu," she whispered, "adieu, petit Henri. La tante must not come to see him any more, and Henri must be a good boy and love his mother." And with one long look at the child's eyes fixed on her so wonderingly, Jeanne-Marie rose softly and left the farm.

From that day started the great conflict between her love and her pride. Though, to her simple nature, the jealousy of a woman who seemed to her to have in abundance everything that made life worth living, was utterly incomprehensible, she said to herself over and over as she went home, that such a scene as that should never happen again. And as she lay in her narrow bed that night,