e of those struggles
which physicians alone comprehend,--the reward of which, in case of
success, is never found in the venal pay nor in the patients themselves,
but in the gentle satisfaction of conscience, in the invisible ideal
palm gathered by true artists from the contentment which fills their
soul after accomplishing a noble work. The physician strains towards
good as an artist towards beauty, each impelled by that grand sentiment
which we call virtue. This daily contest wiped out of Doctor Martener's
mind the petty irritations of that other contest of the Tiphaines and
the Vinets,--as always happens to men when they find themselves face to
face with a great and real misery to conquer.

Monsieur Martener had begun his career in Paris; but the cruel activity
of the city and its insensibility to its masses of suffering had shocked
his gentle soul, fitted only for the quiet life of the provinces.
Moreover, he was under the yoke of his beautiful native land. He
returned to Provins, where he married and settled, and cared almost
lovingly for the people, who were to him like a large family. During
the whole of Pierrette's illness he was careful not to speak of her. His
reluctance to answer the questions of those who asked about her was so
evident that persons soon ceased to put them. Pierrette was to him, what
indeed she truly was, a poem, mysterious, profound, vast in suffering,
such as doctors find at times in their terrible experience. He felt an
admiration for this delicate young creature which he would not share
with any one.

This feeling of the physician for his patient was, however,
unconsciously communicated (like all true feelings) to Monsieur and
Madame Auffray, whose house became, so long as Pierrette was in it,
quiet and silent. The children, who had formerly played so joyously with
her, agreed among themselves with the loving grace of childhood to be
neither noisy nor troublesome. They made it a point of honor to be good
because Pierrette was ill. Monsieur Auffray's house was in the Upper
town, beneath the ruins of the Chateau, and it was built upon a sort of
terrace formed by the overthrow of the old ramparts. The occupants could
have a view of the valley from the little fruit-garden enclosed by walls
which overlooked the town. The roofs of the other houses came to about
the level of the lower wall of this garden. Along the terrace ran a
path, by which Monsieur Auffray's study could be entered through a