homespun and home-woven ones, dating from nobody knew when, down to the smooth, fine, glossy ones with deep hemstitching on the top and bottom, and Madeleine's initials set in a delicately embroidered wreath. Of course she had pillow-slips to go with them, and piles of woolen blankets, fluffy, soft and white, and a big puffy eiderdown covered with bright satin as the finishing touch for each well-furnished bed. Madeleine pretended to be modern sometimes, and to say it was absurd to have so many, but in her heart, inherited from long generations of passionately home-keeping women, she took immense satisfaction in all the ample furnishings of her pretty little home. What woman would not? Now, although all this has a great deal to do with what happened to Madeleine, I am afraid you will think that I am making too long an inventory of her house, so I will not tell you about the shining silver in the buffet drawers, nor even about the beautiful old walled garden, full of flowers and vines and fruit-trees, which lay at the back of the pharmacy. The back windows of the new bride's habitation looked down into the tree-tops of this garden, and along its graveled walks her children were to run and play. For very soon the new family began to grow: first, a little blue-eyed girl like Madeleine; then, two years later, a dark-eyed boy like Jules--all very suitable and as it should be, like everything else that happened to Madeleine. She herself, happily absorbed in her happy life and in the care of all her treasures, reverted rapidly to type, forgot most of her modern education, and became a model wife and mother on the pattern of all the other innumerable model wives and mothers in the history of her provincial family. She lived well within their rather small income, and no year passed without their adding to the modest store of savings which had come down to them because all their grandmothers had lived well within _their_ incomes. They kept the titles relative to this little fortune, together with what cash they had, and all their family papers, in a safe in the pharmacy, sunk in the wall and ingeniously hidden behind a set of false shelves. They never passed this hiding-place without the warm, _sheltered_ feeling which a comfortable little fortune gives,--the feeling which poor people go all their lives without knowing.