'Well, it seems to me sure enough. Especially if he's at all inquisitive, for he has never seen the little one, though he must know that he exists. And besides there's you whom he may wish to see again.'

She silenced him with an entreating gesture. Charlot, awakened by the talking, had raised his head. With a vague expression in his eyes, as though he were emerging from a dream, he recalled an insulting phrase which some village joker had taught him, and with the grave air of the three-year-old urchin that he was, declared: 'They're pigs, the Prussians.'

At this his mother distractedly caught him in her arms and sat him on her lap. Ah! the poor little fellow, at once her joy and her despair whom she loved with her whole soul, but whom she could not look at without weeping, this son of hers whom to her grief she often heard called the Prussian by the youngsters of his own age who played with him on the road. She kissed him as if to drive his words back into his mouth. 'Who taught you such naughty words? You mustn't say them, my darling.'

With childish obstinacy, however, Charlot stifled a laugh and made all haste to repeat: 'The Prussians are pigs!'

Then, on seeing his mother burst into tears, he also began to cry, winding his arms round her neck. Ah, Lord! what new misfortune was in store for her! Was it not sufficient that she had lost in Honoré the only hope of her life, the certainty of forgetting and of becoming happy once more? At present that other man must needs reappear to make her misery complete.

'Come,' she murmured, 'come to by-by, my darling. Mother loves you very dearly all the same, for you don't know that you grieve her.'

Then she went off, leaving Prosper for a moment alone. He, in order not to embarrass her by his glances, had pretended to be wholly absorbed in carving his whip-stock.

However, before putting Charlot to bed, Silvine habitually took him to say good-night to Jean, with whom he was great friends. That evening, as she entered the room candle in hand, she perceived the wounded man sitting up in bed with his eyes wide open. So he wasn't asleep, then? Well, no, he had been ruminating on all sorts of matters, in the silence of that wintry night. And whilst she crammed the stove with coals, he played for a moment with Charlot who rolled about on the bed like a kitten. Jean was acquainted with Silvine's story and had a friendly feeling for this brave, docile girl, so severely tried by misfortune, now in mourning for the only man she had ever loved, with no other consolation remaining to her than that little child whose birth had proved her everlasting torment. And thus, when, after closing the stove, she drew near to the bed to take Charlot in her arms again, Jean, detecting by the redness of her eyes that she had been weeping, began to question her. What was the matter, then? Had somebody been grieving her again? But she would not answer: later on, if it were worth while, she would perhaps tell him all about it. Ah! good Lord! had not her life now become a life of ceaseless grief?

She was on the point of taking Charlot away when all at once a sound of voices and footsteps was heard in the yard. Jean listened in surprise. 'What's up? It can't be Fouchard coming back, I didn't hear the cartwheels.'

Whilst lying in that lonely, distant room he had ended by acquiring a knowledge of all the inner life of the farm, the slightest sounds of which had become familiar to him. Still lending an ear, he promptly resumed: 'Ah, yes, it's those fellows, the Francs-tireurs of the Dieulet Woods, who have come for some grub.'