peared on the surface. Now that she had all the time to do nothing but think of these things, she thought about them with a vengeance.
She refused to see anybody. Every day a small heap of cards and letters was brought to her, but the heap became smaller every day, naturally. You cannot force a door which remains obstinately shut; but she saw abandonment in the decreasing pile. She was morbidly susceptible to every fancied slight. At the time of the accident the newspapers had been full of eulogies and articles more or less resembling obituary notices of Karl du Boys; now that people were reassured about him, the papers wrote about other subjects. She read them jealously, every day, and when his name no longer appeared, she felt grieved and hurt. It seemed to her as though the silence of the tomb were round them both.
"She read them jealously."
Sometimes a bill or two would crop up in her pile of letters; tradesmen demanding payment. These scented their downfall, then? Among these latter was one of fifty francs for the sabots—ah, the sabots! That day Jeanne wept.
The weeks dragged slowly by, and at length the sick man was able to get up. Life came back in him: one might almost say that the poor face, in spite of the scars, regained much of its old appearance, only the eyes were dreadful to look upon. Karl remained very depressed, and absorbed in thoughts which might easily be read in his countenance. Knowing that Jeanne was constantly near him, taking care of him, reading to him aloud when he felt well enough to listen, all gentleness and devotion, he would have liked to thank her, but did not know how to set about doing so. With a sick man's sensitiveness, he divined the change in his wife. She did her duty courageously, but still it was her duty: devoted and attentive as she was, there was one thing which betrayed her, and that was her voice. You may train your countenance, your words, your gestures to hide the feelings, but the voice rebels against constraint, it takes its subtle inflexions from your inmost thoughts—the sweetest of voices may have cruel cadences, and is cold and blank when the heart remains unresponsive. The blind man, whose hearing was growing extremely sensitive, was bewildered at times, trying not so much to understand the actual meaning of his wife's sentences, as striving to account for the peculiar intonations of her voice.
The financial situation, however, had to be faced. The expenses of the du Boys' housekeeping amounted to, at least, fifty thousand francs a year. Even by cutting down superfluities—the carriage from the livery stables, the man-servant, and a good many other luxuries which had become useless—Jeanne decided that there was no possible means of keeping on their house in the Avenue de Villiers. Karl was strongly opposed to this change. If he were blind, his brain remained intact. With a secretary to aid him, he could continue his work: not all, indeed—that part of it which demanded contact with active life, life out of doors, was now impossible. Jeanne tried to make him understand that it was exactly
