I was sent home to America in June that year, before the end of the school-term. The good-bys were said at lunch-time, before my schoolmates went off to the lesson in deportment. The last I saw of the Brodards at the time, was through the door of the salon as I passed on my way to the street. They were learning how to handle a fan, how to open it--“not tearing it open with both hands like a peasant girl, but flirting it open with a sinuous bend of the wrist of one hand ... not so abrupt!... smooth, suave, with an aristocratic....” As I went down the hall, the voice of Professor Delacour died away on these words. I wondered what poor dear Papa was up to now. Two years later when I was taken back to France and went to visit the Brodards, I found that he was still up to the same sort of thing. Just then he was making the echoes yell in the defense of a singularly unattractive, snuffy old man, who lived in a village six or seven kilometers away from Morvilliers. Old M. Duval, it seemed, had gone to South America in his youth, had accumulated some property there, and had lost his religion. Now, at sixty-nine, with so it was said, enough money to live on, he had come back to Fressy, had bought a comfortable little home there, and settled down to end his days in his birthplace. But Fressy, as it happened, had always been and still was noted for its piety and conservatism. The curé of the parish was a man of flaming zeal, and the Mayor was also a very devout ultramontane. Till then their influence had been unquestioned in the town. They had boasted that there was one loyal village left in France where none of the poisonous new ideas had come in to corrupt the working classes, and to wean them from their dutiful submission to the rule of their spiritual and secular betters. Apparently till then, M. Brodard had overlooked the existence of such a village near him. His attention was now very much called to it by the persecution of old M. Duval. The persistent and ostentatious absence from Mass of the returned traveler was followed by a shower of stones which broke most of his windows. His easy-going advice given publicly in a café to some young workmen of the town to follow his example, to stand up for themselves, get higher wages or strike, was answered by the poisoning of his dog. The old fellow became indignant, and never dreaming of the heat of the feeling against him, walked straight up to M. le Curé one day in the street, and asked him--as if the priest had anything to do with what was happening!--whether the laws of France did or did not permit a man to live quietly in his own house, no matter what his opinions were! That night some anonymous defender of the status quo set fire to his chicken-house. It was at this time that M. Brodard began to be aware of the existence of Fressy.