"God keep you from the she-wolf, and from your heart's deep desire!"  
My old mother, God rest her, said that to me when first she began to see that my love was set on Magali—and saw, too, that I was winning from Magali the love that belonged to Jan, who had her promise.
 
[140] "It is an old man's lifetime, mother," I said, "since a wolf has been seen near Les Martigues." And I laughed and kissed her.
 
"Worse than a wolf is a heart that covets what it may not have, Marius," she answered. "Magali is as good as Jan's wife, and you know it. For a year she has been promised to him. She is my dead sister's child, and she is in my care—and in your care too, because you and she and I are all that is left of us, and you are the head of our house, the man. You are doing wickedness in trying to take her away from Jan—and Jan your own close friend, who saved your life out of the sea. The match is a good match for Magali, and she was contented with it until you—living here close beside her in your own house—began to steal away her heart from him. It is rascal work, Marius, that you are doing. You are playing false as a house-father and false as a friend—and God help me that I must speak such words to my own son! That is why I say, and I say it solemnly, 'God keep you from the she-wolf, and from your heart's deep desire!' That desire has no right to be in your heart, Marius. Drag it out of your heart and cast it away!"
 
But I only laughed and kissed her again,[141] and told her that I would take good care of myself if a she-wolf tried to eat me—and so I went away, still laughing, to my fishing in the Gulf of Fos.
 
But I did not laugh when I was alone in my boat, slipping down the étang de Caronte seaward. What she had said had made me see things clearly which until then had been half hid in a haze. We had slipped into our love for each other, Magali and I, softly and easily—just as my boat was slipping down the étang. Every day of our lives we were together, in the close way that housemates are together in a little house of four rooms. Before I got up in the morning I could hear her moving near me, only a thin wall between us; and her movements, again, were the last sounds that I heard at night. She waited on me at my meals. She helped my mother to mend my clothes—the very patches on my coat would bring to my mind t............