to do. "I could not well spare her if I would," Suzanne would say to herself; "what with two babies and me so long in getting on my feet this time."
And Jeanne-Marie put on the clean white bodice every day before her dinner, and sat in the little garden with her eyes fixed on the turning in the white road that led to M. François's métairie, but it was not more than one day a week that Anna would come in sight, with little Henri in her arms. The other days Jeanne-Marie would sit, shading her eyes and watching, till long after the hour when she could expect them to appear.
At first, after the quarrel, she had believed in Suzanne's reiterated assurances that "Anna would come every other day or so," and many were the wasted afternoons of disappointment that she courted in her little garden. Sometimes she would rise to her feet and a sudden impulse to go up to the farm, not a mile away, if only kiss le petit and come home again, laid hold of her; but the memory of Suzanne's cold looks of surprise, and the "Is anything wrong, Jeanne-Marie?" that would meet her, was sufficient to force her into her chair again with a little hopeless sigh. "When the calf is gone, the mother mourns for it all the day," Marthe said grimly, when she surprised her one day watching the white turning. But Jeanne-Marie answered her miserably: "Ah, but I never butt at my calf, and they have taken it from me all the same."
There was great rejoicing in the cottage the day that Anna's white blouse and large green umbrella came in sight, and the three sat in the kitchen together: Anna eating smilingly the cakes and biscuits that grateful Jeanne-Marie made specially for her, and Henri crawling happily on the floor. "He said 'Maman' to Suzanne yesterday," Anna would announce, as Jeanne-Marie hurried to meet her at the gate; or, "Firman says he heardhim
