perfectly well, she could even laugh like everybody else, but it was
quite impossible for her to speak a single word.

While Jean le Rouge was telling me these things his wife used to look
at him and move her eyes as if she were reading a book. Her face still
bore deep burn marks, but one soon got accustomed to it, and remembered
nothing of her face but the mouth with its white teeth, and her eyes,
which were never still. She used to call her children with a long, low
cry, and they came running up, and always understood all the signs she
made to them. I was so sorry that they had to leave the house on the
hill. They were the last friends I had left, and I thought of telling
Madame Alphonse about them, hoping that she might get her husband to
keep them on. I found an opportunity one day, when M. Tirande and his
son had come into the linen-room talking about the changes they were
going to make at the farm. M. Alphonse said he didn't want any cattle.
He spoke of buying machinery, cutting down the pine trees and clearing
the hillside. The stables would do for sheds for the machines, and he
would use the house on the hill to store fodder in. I don't know
whether Madame Alphonse was listening. She went on making lace, and
seemed to be giving her full attention to it. As soon as the two men
had gone I plucked up courage to talk of Jean le Rouge. I told her how
useful he had been to Master Silvain. I told her how sorry he was to
leave the house in which he had lived for so long, and when I stopped,
trembling for the answer which was coming, Madame Alphonse took her
needles out of the thread. "I believe I have made a mistake," she
said. She counted up to nineteen, and said again, "What a nuisance it
is. I shall have to undo a whole row." When I told Jean le Rouge
about this, he was angry, and shook his fist at Villevieille. His wife
put her hand on his shoulder and looked at him, and he was quiet at
once.

Jean le Rouge left the house on the hill at the end of January, and I
was very sad.

I had no friends left now. I hardly recognized the farm any more. All
these new people had made themselves quite at home there, and I seemed
to myself to be a new-comer. The serving-woman looked at me with
distrust, and the ploughman avoided talking to me. The servant's name
was Adele. All day long you could hear her grumbling and dragging her
wooden shoes after her as she walked. She made a noise even when she