dy trees out-doors and made the
timbers of the old farmhouse creak and groan. Think of the sufferings
the poor fellows would have to endure should the winter be severe,
fighting in the snow, without bread, without fire!

"Bah!" rejoined Jean, "that's a very nice letter of his, and it's a
comfort to have heard from him. We must not despair."

Thus, day by day, the month of October ran its course, with gray
melancholy skies, and if ever the wind went down for a short space it
was only to bring the clouds back in darker, heavier masses. Jean's
wound was healing very slowly; the outflow from the drain was not the
"laudable pus" which would have permitted the doctor to remove the
appliance, and the patient was in a very enfeebled state, refusing,
however, to be operated on in his dread of being left a cripple. An
atmosphere of expectant resignation, disturbed at times by transient
misgivings for which there was no apparent cause, pervaded the
slumberous little chamber, to which the tidings from abroad came in
vague, indeterminate shape, like the distorted visions of an evil dream.
The hateful war, with its butcheries and disasters, was still raging out
there in the world, in some quarter unknown to them, without their
ever being able to learn the real course of events, without their being
conscious of aught save the wails and groans that seemed to fill the air
from their mangled, bleeding country. And the dead leaves rustled in the
paths as the wind swept them before it beneath the gloomy sky, and over
the naked fields brooded a funereal silence, broken only by the cawing
of the crows, presage of a bitter winter.

A principal subject of conversation between them at this time was the
hospital, which Henriette never left except to come and cheer Jean with
her company. When she came in at evening he would question her, making
the acquaintance of each of her charges, desirous to know who would die
and who recover; while she, whose heart and soul were in her occupation,
never wearied, but related the occurrences of the day in their minutest
details.

"Ah," she would always say, "the poor boys, the poor boys!"

It was not the ambulance of the battlefield, where the blood from the
wounded came in a fresh, bright stream, where the flesh the surgeon's
knife cut into was firm and healthy; it was the decay and rottenness of
the hospital, where the odor of fever and gangrene hung in the air, damp
with the exhalations of the lingeri