“You will excuse me,” resumed the host, in quite a different tone. “You see, we are obliged to be very careful. There has been some trouble in Montaignac.”
The imminence of the peril and the responsibility devolving upon him, gave Maurice an assurance unusual to him; and it was in the most careless, off-hand manner possible that he concocted a quite plausible story to explain his early arrival on foot accompanied by a sick wife. He congratulated himself upon his address, but the old corporal was far from satisfied.
“We are too near the frontier to bivouac here,” he grumbled. “As soon as the young lady is on her feet again we must hurry on.”
He believed, and Maurice hoped, that twenty-four hours of rest would restore Marie-Anne.
They were mistaken. The very springs of life in her existence seemed to have been drained dry. She did not appear to suffer, but she remained in a death-like torpor, from which nothing could arouse her. They spoke to her but she made no response. Did she hear? did she comprehend? It was extremely doubtful.
By rare good fortune the mother of the proprietor proved to be a good, kind-hearted old woman, who would not leave the bedside of Marie-Anne—of Mme. Dubois, as she was called at the Traveller’s Rest.
It was not until the evening of the third day that they heard Marie-Anne utter a word.
“Poor girl!” she sighed; “poor, wretched girl!”
It was of herself that she spoke.
By a phenomenon not very unusual after a crisis in which reason has been temporarily obscured, it seemed to her that it was someone else who had been the victim of all the misfortunes, whose recollections gradually returned to her like the memory of a painful dream.