midnight
A boy carrying milk found him at daylight the next morning lying face down in the track of his cart , dead , with a fractured skull . Before another month had passed , the Mère Bourron had sold the farm and gone to live with her sister -- a lean woman who took in sewing . Yvonne was free . Free to work and to be married , and she did work with silent ferocity from dawn until dark , washing the heavy coarse linen for a farm , and scrubbing the milk-pans bright until often long after midnight -- and saved . Jean worked too , but mostly when he pleased , and had his hair cut on fête days , most of which he spent in the café and saw Yvonne during the odd moments when she was free . Life over the blacksmith 's shop , where she had taken a room , went merrily for a while . Six months later -- it is such an old story that it is hardly worth the telling -- but it was long after dark when she got back from work and she found it lying on the table in her rough clean little room -- a scrap of paper beside some tiny worsted things she had been knitting for weeks .