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Madame Aubain, who was counting stitches in her knitting, put her work down beside her, unsealed the letter, trembled, and in a low voice with a serious look:

‘It’s bad news…you are being told of. Your nephew—’

He was dead. They told her no more.

Felicity fell on a chair, leaning her head on the wall, and shut her eyes, and her eyelids suddenly grew pink. Then, her head drooping, her eyes fixed, she repeated at intervals:

‘Poor little chap! Poor little chap!’

Liébard looked at her, emitting deep sighs. Madame Aubain was trembling slightly.

She proposed to her to go and see her sister at Trouville.

Felicity answered by a gesture that she had no need to go there.

There was a silence. Good old Liébard thought it proper to go away. Then she said:

‘It’s nothing to them!’

Her head sank down again; and mechanically she lifted, from time to time, the long knitting-needles on the work-table.

Some women passed in the courtyard with a barrow heaped with dripping linen.

As she saw them through the window panes she remembered her washing; she had soaked it the night before, to-day it had to be rinsed, and she left the room.

Her washboard and her tub were on the brink of the River Toucques. She flung on the bank a heap of chemises, tucked up her sleeves, took up her beating-stick; and the heavy blows she gave were heard in the other gardens alongside. The fields were empty, the wind rippled the river; at the bottom long weeds swept over like the hair of dead men floating in the water. She restrained her sorrow till evening, was very brave; but, in her room she abandoned herself to it, lying flat, face down on her mattress, her eyes in her pillow, and her fists against her temples.

Much later, from Victor’s captain himself, she learnt the circumstances of his death. He had been bled too much at the hospital for yellow fever. Four doctors were looking after him at once. He died immediately, and the chief had said:

‘Tut, tut, that’s another one!’

His parents had always treated him barbarously. She preferred not to see them again; and they made no advances, either through forgetfulness or the callousness of the wretched poor.

Virginia grew weaker.

Shortness of breath, a cough, a continual fever, and red spots on her cheek-bones revealed some deep-seated affection. Monsieur Pourpart had advised a stay in Provence. Madame Aubain made up her mind to go there, and would have immediately recalled her daughter home except for the climate of Pont-l’Évêque.

She made an arrangement with a man who hired carriages to take her to the convent every Thursday. There is in the gardens a terrace from which you can discern the Seine. Virginia would walk there on her arm, on the fallen grape-vine leaves. Sometimes the sun, shining through the clouds, made her blink her eyelids, when she looked at the sails in the distance, and all the horizon from the château of Tancarville to the lighthouse at Havre. Then they rested in the arbour. Her mother had got a little barrel of an excellent Malaga wine; and, laughing at the idea of being drunk, she would drink two fingers of it, not more.

Her strength improved. The autumn slipped away quietly. Felicity reassured Madame Aubain. But one evening that she had been on an errand in the neighbourhood she met before the door Monsieur Pourpart’s gig: and he himself was in the vestibule. Madame Aubain was tying on her hat.

‘Give me my footwarmer, my purse, my gloves: be quicker, can’t you?’

Virginia had an inflammation of the lungs: it was perhaps hopeless.

‘Not yet,’ said the doctor, and the two of them got into the carriage under the snowflakes which eddied around. Night was about to fall. It was very cold.