e could not understand where it was she
longed to go; one evening, however, she unconsciously uttered a sentence
which at once revealed to her the secret of her restlessness. "Oh! how
I long to see the ocean," she said as she sat down to dinner.

The sea! That was what she missed. The sea with its salt breezes, its
never-ceasing roar, its tempests, its strong odors; the sea, near which
she had lived for five and twenty years, which had always felt near her
and which, unconsciously, she had come to love like a human being.

Massacre, too, was very uneasy. The very evening of his arrival at the
new house he had installed himself under the kitchen-dresser and no one
could get him to move out. There he lay all day long, never stirring,
except to turn himself over with a smothered grunt, until it was dark;
then he got up and dragged himself towards the garden door, grazing
himself against the wall as he went. After he had stayed out of doors a
few minutes he came in again and sat down before the stove which was
still warm, and as soon as Jeanne and Rosalie had gone to bed he began
to howl. The whole night long he howled, in a pitiful, deplorable way,
sometimes ceasing for an hour only to recommence in a still more doleful
tone. A barrel was put outside the house and he was tied up to it, but
he howled just the same out of doors as in, and as he was old and almost
dying, he was brought back to the kitchen again.

It was impossible for Jeanne to sleep, for the whole night she could
hear the old dog moaning and scratching as he tried to get used to this
new house which he found so different from his old home. Nothing would
quiet him; his eyes were dim and it seemed as if the knowledge of his
infirmity made him keep still while everyone else was awake and
downstairs, and at night he wandered restlessly about until daybreak, as
if he only dared to move in the darkness which makes all beings
sightless for the time. It was an intense relief to everyone when one
morning he was found dead.

Winter wore on, and Jeanne gave way more and more to an insuperable
hopelessness; it was no longer a keen, heartrending grief that she felt,
but a dull, gloomy melancholy. There was nothing to rouse her from it,
no one came to see her, and the road which passed before her door was
almost deserted. Sometimes a gig passed by driven by a red-faced man
whose blouse, blown out by the wind, looked like a blue balloon, and
sometimes a cart crawled pas