id having first inserted a
drain--an India rubber tube--to carry off the pus. He frankly told his
patient, however, that unless he submitted to an operation he must not
hope to have the use of his limb for a very long time. Still, after the
second week, the fever subsided and the young man's general condition
was improved, so long as he could be content to rest quiet in his bed.

Then Jean's and Henriette's relations began to be established on a more
systematic basis. Fixed habits commenced to prevail; it seemed to them
that they had never lived otherwise--that they were to go on living
forever in that way. All the hours and moments that she did not devote
to the ambulance were spent with him; she saw to it that he had his food
and drink at proper intervals. She assisted him to turn in bed with
a strength of wrist that no one, seeing her slender arms, would have
supposed was in her. At times they would converse; but as a general
thing, especially in the earlier days, they had not much to say. They
never seemed to tire of each other's company, though. On the whole it
was a very pleasant life they led in that calm, restful atmosphere, he
with the horrible scenes of the battlefield still fresh in his memory,
she in her widow's weeds, her heart bruised and bleeding with the great
loss she had sustained. At first he had experienced a sensation of
embarrassment, for he felt she was his superior, almost a lady, indeed,
while he had never been aught more than a common soldier and a peasant.
He could barely read and write. When finally he came to see that she
affected no airs of superiority, but treated him on the footing of an
equal, his confidence returned to him in a measure and he showed himself
in his true colors, as a man of intelligence by reason of his sound,
unpretentious common sense. Besides, he was surprised at times to think
he could note a change was gradually coming over him; it seemed to him
that his mind was less torpid than it had been, that it was clearer
and more active, that he had novel ideas in his head, and more of them;
could it be that the abominable life he had been leading for the last
two months, his horrible sufferings, physical and moral, had exerted a
refining influence on him? But that which assisted him most to overcome
his shyness was to find that she was really not so very much wiser than
he. She was but a little child when, at her mother's death, she became
the household drudge, with her three