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The patient’s fever was so violent during the first few days that Henriette scarce ever left him. Doctor Dalichamp dropped in every morning on his way to the hospital and examined and dressed the wound. As the ball had passed out, after breaking the tibia, he was surprised that the case presented no better aspect; he feared there was a splinter of the bone remaining there that he had not succeeded in finding with the probe, and that might make resection necessary. He mentioned the matter to Jean, but the young man could not endure the thought of an operation that would leave him with one leg shorter than the other and lame him permanently. No, no! he would rather die than be a cripple for life. So the good doctor, leaving the wound to develop further symptoms, confined himself for the present to applying a dressing of lint saturated with sweet oil and phenic acid having first inserted a drain–an India rubber tube–to carry off the pus. He frankly told his patient, however, that unless he submitted to an operation he must not hope to have the use of his limb for a very long time. Still, after the second week, the fever subsided and the young man’s general condition was improved, so long as he could be content to rest quiet in his bed.

Then Jean’s and Henriette’s relations began to be established on a more systematic basis. Fixed habits commenced to prevail; it seemed to them that they had never lived otherwise–that they were to go on living forever in that way. All the hours and moments that she did not devote to the ambulance were spent with him; she saw to it that he had his food and drink at proper intervals. She assisted him to turn in bed with a strength of wrist that no one, seeing her slender arms, would have supposed was in her. At times they would converse; but as a general thing, especially in the earlier days, they had not much to say. They never seemed to tire of each other’s company, though. On the whole it was a very pleasant life they led in that calm, restful atmosphere, he with the horrible scenes of the battlefield still fresh in his memory, she in her widow’s weeds, her heart bruised and bleeding with the great loss she had sustained. At first he had experienced a sensation of embarrassment, for he felt she was his superior, almost a lady, indeed, while he had never been aught more than a common soldier and a peasant. He could barely read and write. When finally he came to see that she affected no airs of superiority, but treated him on the footing of an equal, his confidence returned to him in a measure and he showed himself in his true colors, as a man of intelligence by reason of his sound, unpretentious common sense. Besides, he was surprised at times to think he could note a change was gradually coming over him; it seemed to him that his mind was less torpid than it had been, that it was clearer and more active, that he had novel ideas in his head, and more of them; could it be that the abominable life he had been leading for the last two months, his horrible sufferings, physical and moral, had exerted a refining influence on him? But that which assisted him most to overcome his shyness was to find that she was really not so very much wiser than he. She was but a little child when, at her mother’s death, she became the household drudge, with her three men to care for, as she herself expressed it–her grandfather, her father, and her brother–and she had not had the time to lay in a large stock of learning. She could read and write, could spell words that were not too long, and “do sums,” if they were not too intricate; and that was the extent of her acquirement. And if she continued to intimidate him still, if he considered her far and away the superior of all other women upon earth, it was because he knew the ineffable tenderness, the goodness of heart, the unflinching courage, that animated that frail little body, who went about her duties silently and met them as if they had been pleasures.