whelmed him: until there was no more room in his mind for anything but remembrance, no more room in his heart for anything but regret. It was the true, the terrible nostalgia. He wanted his country, his own familiar country, as a little child wants its mother, as a sick child cannot do without her; and the slow, pathetic, helpless tears of old age escaped from his closed eyes, and ran down his pallid cheeks unhindered.
So possessed was he by the agony of this strong yet impotent yearning that he never noticed certain shuffling footsteps which now came near to him, and halted, and then again shuffled hesitatingly away. Presently, however, they returned.
“Mister finds himself not well?” a voice said softly. Philippe opened his eyes with a start.
An old woman was standing before him. She had on a brown stuff dress, bulkily gathered in at the waist, and a large apron of very dark blue linen; on her head, instead of a hat, there was a three-cornered yellow checked handkerchief; and under one arm she carried a round wooden milking-stool, in the other hand a bucket of milk. Just so, exactly, Philippe remembered his own mother to have looked, on any midday of her life; and he looked at the vision in bewilderment. Yet this woman was not his mother—she had not his mother’s face. Her own, however, was full of so mother-like a compassion and sympathy that it spoke straight to his heart, and drew an answer from it.
“I have been ill,” he faltered, as naturally and as appealingly as a child; and then he felt ashamed, and turned away his head. He did not know how far that child-like impulse had decoyed him, or that
