bed, although
Major Bouroche asserted there was nothing more serious than a contusion
of the ankle and a fragment of bone chipped away; the wound refused to
heal and complications of various kinds had ensued. He was able to
get up now, but was in such a state of utter mental prostration, his
mysterious ailment had taken such firm hold upon his system, that he was
content to spend his days in idleness, stretched on a lounge before
a great wood fire. He had wasted away until he was little more than
a shadow, and still the physician who was attending him could find no
lesion to account for that lingering death. He was slowly fading away,
like the flame of a lamp in which the supply of oil is giving out.

Mme. Delaherche, the mother, had immured herself there with him on the
day succeeding the occupation. No doubt they understood each other,
and had expressed in two words, once for all, their common purpose
to seclude themselves in that apartment so long as there should
be Prussians quartered in the house. They had afforded compulsory
hospitality to many of the enemy for various lengths of time; one, a
Captain, M. Gartlauben, was there still, had taken up his abode with
them permanently. But never since that first day had mention of those
things passed the colonel's and the old lady's lips. Notwithstanding her
seventy-eight years she was up every morning soon as it was day and
came and took her position in the fauteuil that was awaiting her in the
chimney nook opposite her old friend. There, by the steady, tranquil
lamplight, she applied herself industriously to knitting socks for the
children of the poor, while he, his eyes fixed on the crumbling brands,
with no occupation for body or mind, was as one already dead, in a state
of constantly increasing stupor. They certainly did not exchange twenty
words in the course of a day; whenever she, who still continued to go
about the house at intervals, involuntarily allowed some bit of news
from the outer world to escape her lips, he silenced her with a gesture,
so that no tidings of the siege of Paris, the disasters on the Loire
and all the daily renewed horrors of the invasion had gained admission
there. But the colonel might stop his ears and shut out the light of day
as he would in his self-appointed tomb; the air he breathed must have
brought him through key-hole and crevices intelligence of the calamity
that was everywhere throughout the land, for every new day beheld him
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