"You are love-sick," said she. "That is bad. Especially for a married woman. It is wrong to love any of God's creatures too much. Trouble will come of it—voyons voir."
"But, aunty," answered Toinette, "Prosper is not just any of God's creatures. He is mine. How could I love him too much? Besides, I don't do it. It does itself. How can I help it?"
"It is a malady," sighed the old woman shaking her head. "It is a malady of youth, my child. There is danger in it—and for Prosper too! You make an idol of a man and you spoil him. You upset his mind. Men are like that. You will bring trouble upon your man, if you don't take care. God will send you a warning—perhaps a countersign of death."
"What is that," cried Toinette, her heart shaking within her breast, "what do you mean with your countersign of death?"
The old woman nodded her head mysteriously and leaned forward, putting her gnarled hand on Toinette's round knee and peering with her faded eyes into the girl's wild-flower face.
"It is the word," said she, "that death speaks before he crosses the threshold. He gives a sign—sometimes one thing, and sometimes another—before he comes in. Our folk in Brittany have understood about that for a long time. My grandmother has told me. It always comes to one who has gone too far, to one who is like you. You must be careful. You must go to Mass every day and pray that your malady may be restrained."
So Toinette, having tasted of the strange chalice of fear, went to the church early every morning while Prosper was away and prayed that she might not love him so much as to make God jealous. The absurdity of such a prayer never occurred to her. She made it with childish simplicity. Probably it did no harm. For when Prosper came home she loved him more than ever. Then she went to High Mass every Sunday morning with him and prayed for other things.
After four years there came a day when Prosper must go away for a longer absence. There was an affair connected with the Department of Forests and Fisheries, which could only be arranged at Ottawa. Thither he must go to see the lawyers, and there he must stay perhaps a month, perhaps two.
You can imagine that Toinette was desolate. The draught of fear that tante Bergeron had given her grew more potent and bitter in her simple heart. And the strange thing was that, although she was ignorant of it, there was apparently something true in the warning which the old woman had given. For jealousy—that vine with flying seeds and strangling creepers—had taken root in the heart of Prosper Leclère.
Yes, I know it is contrary to all the rules and to all the proverbs, but so it happened. It is not true that the strongest love is the most jealous. It is the lesser love, the love which receives more than it gives, that lies open to the floating germs of mistrust and suspicion. And so it was Prosper who began to have doubts whether Toinette thought of him as much when he was away as when he was with her; whether her gladness when he came home was not something that she put on to fool him and humour him; whether her badinage with the commercial travellers (and especially with that good-looking Irishman, Flaherty from Montreal, of whom the village gossips had much to say) might not be more serious than it looked; whether—ah, well, you know, when a man begins to follow fool thoughts like that, they carry him pretty far astray in the wilderness.