standing and looking
at him. He had the same gentleness in his eyes that I had noticed the
first time, and, as if he expected me to tell him another story, "Have
you nothing to tell me this evening?" he asked. Words danced across my
brain, but they did not seem to be worth speaking, and I shook my head
to say no. He said, "I was your friend the other day." Recollection
of what I had said the other day made me feel worse than ever, and I
only said, "You are Madame Alphonse's brother." I left him and did not
dare to go back to the shrubbery again. He often came back to
Villevieille. I never used to look at him, but his voice always made
me feel very uncomfortable.

Since Jean le Rouge had gone I had never known what to do with my time
after mass. Every Sunday I used to pass the house on the hill.
Sometimes I would look in through the gaps in the shutters, and when,
as I sometimes did, I bumped my head, the noise it made used to
frighten me. One Sunday I noticed that there was no lock on the door.
I put my finger on the latch and the door fell open with a loud noise.
I had not expected it to open so quickly, and I stood there longing to
shut it and go away. Then as there was no more noise, and as the sun
had streamed into the house making a big square of light, I made up my
mind to go in, and went in, leaving the door open. The big fireplace
was empty. There was no hook, there was no pot, and the big andirons
had gone. The only things left in the room were the logs of wood which
Jean le Rouge's children used to use as stools. The bark was worn off
them, and the tops of them were polished, as if with wax, from the
children sitting on them.

The second room was quite empty. There were no tiles on the floor, and
the feet of the beds had made little holes in the beaten earth. There
was no lock to the other door either, and I went out into the garden.
There were a few winter vegetables in the beds still, and the fruit
trees were all in flower. Most of them were very old. Some of them
looked like hunchbacks, and their branches bent towards the ground, as
though they found that even the flowers were too heavy for them to
carry. At the bottom of the garden the hill ran down to an immense
plain where the cattle used to graze, and right at the end a row of
poplars made a sort of barrier which kept the sky out of the meadow
land. Little by little I recognized one place after another. There
was a little ri