ened twenty years ago at the death of her son Pierre; the letters
had been sent back from China to "Monsieur le Commissaire," who had
given them to her thus.

Now he was reading out in a consequential voice: "Moan,
Jean-Marie-Sylvestre, registered at Paimpol, folio 213, number 2091,
died on board the _Bien Hoa_, on the 14th of ----."

"What--what has happened to him, my good sir?"

"Discharged--dead," he answered.

It wasn't because this clerk was unkind, but if he spoke in that brutal
way, it was through want of judgment, and from lack of intelligence in
the little incomplete being.

As he saw that she did not understand that technical expression, he said
in Breton:

"_Marw eo_!"

"_Marw eo_!" (He is dead.)

She repeated the words after him, in her aged tremulous voice, as a poor
cracked echo would send back some indifferent phrase. So what she had
partly foreseen was true; but it only made her tremble; now that it was
certain, it seemed to affect her no more. To begin with, her faculty
to suffer was slightly dulled by old age, especially since this last
winter. Pain did not strike her immediately. Something seemed to fall
upside down in her brain, and somehow or another she mixed this death up
with others. She had lost so many of them before. She needed a moment
to grasp that this was her very last one, her darling, the object of
all her prayers, life, and waiting, and of all her thoughts, already
darkened by the sombre approach of second childhood.

She felt a sort of shame at showing her despair before this little
gentleman who horrified her. Was that the way to tell a grandmother of
her darling's death? She remained standing before the desk, stiffened,
and tearing the fringes of her brown shawl with her poor aged hands,
sore and chapped with washing.

How far away she felt from home! Goodness! what a long walk back to be
gone through, and steadily, too, before nearing the whitewashed hut in
which she longed to shut herself up, like a wounded beast who hides
in its hole to die. And so she tried not to think too much and not to
understand yet, frightened above all at the long home-journey.

They gave her an order to go and take, as the heiress, the thirty francs
that came from the sale of Sylvestre's bag; and then the letters, the
certificates, and the box containing the military medal.

She took the whole parcel awkwardly with open fingers, unable to find
pockets to put them in.

She went straight t