The servant replied gently:

‘But—from my nephew!’

‘Oh—your nephew!’ and, shrugging her shoulders, Madame Aubain went on with her walking as if to say: ‘I did not think about him! Moreover, I don’t care! a cabin boy, a beggar, a fine business—while my daughter—Think of it!’

Felicity, although brought up on rudeness, was indignant against madame, then forgot.

It seemed to her quite easy to lose one’s head about the little girl’s concerns.

The two children had an equal importance; one of her heart-strings united them, and their destinies should be the same.

The chemist told her that Victor’s boat had arrived at Havana. He had read the information in a gazette.

Because of the cigars she imagined Havana a country where nothing else was done but smoke, and Victor moving among the niggers in a cloud of tobacco. Could he ‘in case of need’ come back by land? What distance was it from Pont-l’Évêque? To learn that she asked Monsieur Bourais.

He got his atlas, then began explanations about the longitudes, and he had a fine pedant’s smile in face of Felicity’s bewilderment. At length with his pocket pencil he showed her the indentations on an oval mark, a black imperceptible point, adding: ‘That’s it’. She leaned over the map; this network of coloured lines tired her eyes, without teaching her anything; and, Bourais inviting her to say what was worrying her, she begged him to show her the house where Victor was living. Bourais raised his arms, sneezed, laughed enormously; such ingenuousness excited his joy: and Felicity did not understand the cause of it—she who was expecting, perhaps, even to see a photograph of her nephew, so limited was her intelligence.

It was a fortnight afterwards that Liébard, at the hour when the market was on, as was his custom, came into the kitchen and gave her a letter which her brother-in-law had sent. Since neither of the two know how to read, she had recourse to her mistress.

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.