her
have her boy back as they had brought back her husband--with the bullet
in the middle of the forehead!

But she heard a noise of voices. It was the Prussians returning from the
village. She hid her letter very quickly in her pocket, and she received
them quietly, with her ordinary face, having had time to wipe her eyes.

They were laughing, all four, delighted, for they brought with them a
fine rabbit--stolen, doubtless--and they made signs to the old woman
that there was to be something good to east.

She set herself to work at once to prepare breakfast, but when it came
to killing the rabbit, her heart failed her. And yet it was not the
first. One of the soldiers struck it down with a blow of his fist behind
the ears.

The beast once dead, she skinned the red body, but the sight of the
blood which she was touching, and which covered her hands, and which she
felt cooling and coagulating, made her tremble from head to foot,
and she kept seeing her big boy cut in two, bloody, like this still
palpitating animal.

She sat down at table with the Prussians, but she could not eat, not
even a mouthful. They devoured the rabbit without bothering themselves
about her. She looked at them sideways, without speaking, her face so
impassive that they perceived nothing.

All of a sudden she said: "I don't even know your names, and here's
a whole month that we've been together." They understood, not without
difficulty, what she wanted, and told their names.

That was not sufficient; she had them written for her on a paper, with
the addresses of their families, and, resting her spectacles on her
great nose, she contemplated that strange handwriting, then folded the
sheet and put it in her pocket, on top of the letter which told her of
the death of her son.

When the meal was ended she said to the men:

"I am going to work for you."

And she began to carry up hay into the loft where they slept.

They were astonished at her taking all this trouble; she explained to
them that thus they would not be so cold; and they helped her. They
heaped the stacks of hay as high as the straw roof, and in that manner
they made a sort of great chamber with four walls of fodder, warm and
perfumed, where they should sleep splendidly.

At dinner one of them was worried to see that La Mere Sauvage still
ate nothing. She told him that she had pains in her stomach. Then she
kindled a good fire to warm herself, and the four Germans ascended t