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He would do as much of the labour as he could, but the wife and the two older girls must help him. Nataline could go to bed. At this Nataline's short upper lip trembled. She rubbed her eyes with the sleeve of her dress, and began to weep silently. "What is the matter with you?" said her mother, "bad child, have you fear to sleep alone? A big girl like you!"
The fog, the frost, the hail, the snow beleaguered their tower. Hunger and cold, sleeplessness and weariness, pain and discouragement, held rendezvous in that dismal, cramped little room. Many a night Nataline's fife of fun played a feeble, wheezy note. But it played. And the crank went round. And every bit of glass in the lantern was as clear as polished crystal. And the big lamp was full of oil.
Everybody approved of her as the heir of her father, especially young Marcel Thibault. What? Yes, of course. You could not help guessing it. He was Nataline's lover. They were to be married the next summer. They sat together in the best room, while the old mother was rocking to and fro and knitting beside the kitchen stove, and talked of what they were going to do.
Once in a while, when Nataline grieved for her father, she would let Marcel put his arm around her and comfort her in the way that lovers know. But their talk was mainly of the future, because they were young, and of the light, because Nataline's life belonged to it.
It goes on to something definite, like a wedding or a funeral. You have not heard, yet, how near the light came to failing, and how the keeper saved it and something else too. Nataline's story is not told; it is only begun. This first part is only the introduction, just to let you see what kind of a girl she was, and how her life was made.
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