Brigadier Frederick and The Dean's Watch by Erckmann-Chatrian

In the depth of the winter, while all the roads and the mountain paths were covered with snow, and we heard every night the branches of the beech trees breaking like glass under their load of ice, to the right and left of the house, one evening my wife, who, since the commencement of the season, had gone to and fro looking very pale and without speaking, said to me, towards six o'clock, after having lighted the fire in the fireplace, "Frederick, I am going to bed. I do not feel well. I am cold."

She had never said anything like that before. She was a woman who never complained and who, during her youth, had looked after her house up to the very day before her confinements. I suspected nothing, and I replied to her: