of the Golden Pear, the wonder of all rustics. On the rare occasions when her aunt went abroad in this fine vehicle, Victorine sat by her side in an ecstasy of pride and delight. It seemed to her that to be the owner of such a coach as that, to live in a fine house, and have a fine gentleman for one's husband must be the very climax of bliss. She wondered much at her aunt's contentment in her present estate. "How canst thou bear it, Aunt Jeanne?" she said sometimes. "How canst thou bear to live as we live here,--to be in the bar-room with the men, and to sit always in the smoke, after the fine rooms and the company thou hadst for so long?" "Bah!" Jeanne would reply. "It's little thou knowest of that fine company. I had like to die of weariness more often than I was gay in it; and as for fine rooms, I care nothing for them." "But thy husband, Aunt Jeanne," Victorine once ventured to say,--"surely thou wert not weary when he was with thee?" Jeanne's face darkened. "Keep a civiller tongue in thy head," she replied, "than to be talking to widows of the husbands they have buried. He was a good man, Willan Blaycke,--a good man; but I liked him not overmuch, though we lived not in quarrelling. He went his ways, as men go, and I let him be." Victorine's curiosity was by no means satisfied. She asked endless questions of all whom she met who could tell her anything about her aunt's husband. Very much she regretted that she had not been taken from the convent before this strange, free-hearted, rollicking gentleman had died. She would have managed affairs better, she thought, than Aunt Jeanne had done. Romantic visions of herself as his favorite flitted through her brain. "Why didst thou not send for me sooner to come to thee, Aunt Jeanne," she said, "that I too might have seen the life in the great stone house?" A sudden flush covered Jeanne's face. Was she never to hear the end of troublesome questions about the past? "Wilt thou never have done with it?" she said, half angrily. "Has it never been said in thy hearing how that my husband would not permit even my father to come inside of his house, much less one no nearer than thou?" And Jeanne eyed Victorine sharply, with a suspicion which was wholly uncalled for. Nobody had ever been bold or cruel enough to suggest to Victorine any doubts regarding her birth. The girl was indignant. She had never known before that her grandfather had been thus insulted. "What had grandfather done?" she cried. "Was he not thy husband's father, too, being thine? How dared thy husband treat him so?" Jeanne was silent for a few moments. A latent sense of justice to her dead husband restrained her from assenting to Victorine's words. "Nay," she said; "there are many things thou canst not understand. Thy grandfather never complained. Willan Blaycke treated me most fairly while he lived; and if it had not been for the boy, I would have had thee in the stone house to-day, and had all my rights."