“If it was as it used to be,” she broke out in a quavering voice, “you might be restored for Pierre’s coming home.”
At the words Lizette turned, and the old woman began to cry.
“For him to come back at Christmas,” she wailed, “to see that!”
The girl looked quickly away. The rich olive of her cheek had faded to a dead pallor; her hands lay idle in her lap. “For him to come back to see that!” She used to rejoice in Pierre’s love of beauty. He was different from the other young men of the village, who cared more for a woman’s strength than for her face, and who looked always at the earth they tilled and never at the sky. Pierre could be keen and shrewd as any other Norman peasant; but Lizette knew his dreams, his delight in beauty, the thoughts he hid from his neighbors.
Once Lizette had said to him:
“Perhaps I can serve you as well making my lace as though I were strong to work in the fields.”
And Pierre, his dark eyes glowing, had answered:
“It is not your service I want, my Lizette. I want only to have you near me, to be able to look into your face.”
The words had pleased her when he spoke them; now they stabbed her to the heart. And so did these lines of the letter Pierre had written after he heard from the curé about the burning of his house, and how Lizette had saved his mother: “My beautiful, brave Lizette! How shall I wait to see you! Your face is always before me.”
“Mère Bernay,”—Lizette had turned again to the old woman,—“listen to me, Mère Bernay. What did you mean when you said I could be restored for Pierre’s return if it was as it used to be?”