s, like a prisoner. She lived in a constant state of
nervous anxiety, and looked forward to the holidays with more impatience
than her son. She began to take long walks about the country, with
Massacre as her only companion, and would stay out of doors all day
long, dreamily musing. Sometimes she sat on the cliff the whole
afternoon watching the sea; sometimes she walked, across the wood, to
Yport, thinking, as she went, of how she had walked there when she was
young, and of the long, long years which had elapsed since she had
bounded along these very paths, a hopeful, happy girl.

Every time she saw her son, it seemed to Jeanne as if ten years had
passed since she had seen him last; for every month he became more of a
man, and every month she became more aged. Her father looked like her
brother, and Aunt Lison (who had been quite faded when she was
twenty-five, and had never seemed to get older since) might have been
taken for her elder sister.

Poulet did not study very hard; he spent two years in the fourth form,
managed to get through the third in one twelvemonth, then spent two more
in the second, and was nearly twenty when he reached the rhetoric class.
He had grown into a tall, fair youth, with whiskered cheeks and a
budding moustache. He came over to Les Peuples every Sunday now, instead
of his mother going to see him; and as he had been taking riding lessons
for some time past, he hired a horse and accomplished the journey from
Havre in two hours.

Every Sunday Jeanne started out early in the morning to go and meet him
on the road, and with her went Aunt Lison and the baron, who was
beginning to stoop, and who walked like a little old man, with his hands
clasped behind his back as if to prevent himself from pitching forward
on his face. The three walked slowly along, sometimes sitting down by
the wayside to rest, and all the while straining their eyes to catch the
first glimpse of the rider. As soon as he appeared, looking like a black
speck on the white road, they waved their handkerchiefs, and he at once
put his horse at a gallop, and came up like a whirlwind, frightening
his mother and Aunt Lison, and making his grandfather exclaim, "Bravo!"
in the admiration of impotent old age.

Although Paul was a head taller than his mother, she always treated him
as if he were a child and still asked him, as in former years, "Your
feet are not cold, are they, Poulet?" If he went out of doors, after
lunch, to smoke a