, and sometimes she pored over an
almanac for hours without being able to remember whether it was even in
that year that such and such a thing had happened. She would go slowly
round the dining-room looking at these images of past years, which, to
her, were as pictures of an ascent to Calvary, until one of them
arrested her attention and then she would sit gazing at it all the rest
of the day, absorbed in her recollections.

Soon the sap began to rise in the trees; the seeds were springing up,
the leaves were budding and the air was filled with the faint, sweet
smell of the apple blossoms which made the orchards a glowing mass of
pink. As summer approached Jeanne became very restless. She could not
keep still; she went in and out twenty times a day, and, as she rambled
along past the farms, she worked herself into a perfect state of fever.

A daisy half hidden in the grass, a sunbeam falling through the leaves,
or the reflection of the sky in a splash of water in a rut was enough to
agitate and affect her, for their sight brought back a kind of echo of
the emotions she had felt when, as a young girl, she had wandered
dreamily through the fields; and though now there was nothing to which
she could look forward, the soft yet exhilarating air sent the same
thrill through her as when all her life had lain before her. But this
pleasure was not unalloyed with pain, and it seemed as if the universal
joy of the awakening world could now only impart a delight which was
half sorrow to her grief-crushed soul and withered heart. Everything
around her seemed to have changed. Surely the sun was hardly so warm as
in her youth, the sky so deep a blue, the grass so fresh a green, and
the flowers, paler and less sweet, could no longer arouse within her the
exquisite ecstasies of delight as of old. Still she could enjoy the
beauty around her, so much that sometimes she found herself dreaming
and hoping again; for, however cruel Fate may be, is it possible to give
way to utter despair when the sun shines and the sky is blue?

She went for long walks, urged on and on by her inward excitement, and
sometimes she would suddenly stop and sit down by the roadside to think
of her troubles. Why had she not been loved like other women? Why had
even the simple pleasure of an uneventful existence been refused her?

Sometimes, again forgetting for a moment that she was old, that there
was no longer any pleasure in store for her, and that, with the