"And now comes a curious thing: so puffed up was that big animal of a father over the impression the girl had made, and so proud was he over the offers he received shortly after for her hand--among them a fellow herdsman twenty years her senior--that he immediately began to put on airs of distinction. A man with such a daughter, he said to himself, was also a man of weight and prominence in the community; he, therefore, had certain duties to perform. This was his only child; moreover, was he not rich, being the owner of more than a hundred head of cattle, and did he not have money in the banks? Loyette--have I told you her name was Loyette?--Loyette should marry no one of the young fellows about her--he had other and higher views for her. What these views were nobody knew, but one thing was certain, and that was that Henri, whom she loved with all her heart, and who had danced with her around the May-pole, was forbidden the house. The excuse was that his people were not of her class; that they were poor, his father being.... Oh, the same stupid story which has been told thousands of times and will continue to be told as long as there are big, thick-necked fathers who lay down the law with their sledge-hammer fists, and ambitious old gentlemen"--here she cut her eye at Lemois--"who try to wheedle you with their flimsy arguments--arguments which they would have thrown in your face had you tried it on them when they themselves were young. The father forgot, of course--just as they all forget--that she was precisely the same young girl with precisely the same heart before the fête as she was after it; that every rag on her back I had given her; that her triumph was purely a matter of chance--my going first to his house and thus finding her--and that on the very next day she had milked the cows and polished the tins just as she had done since she was old enough to help her mother. "Again that old story was repeated: the mother begged and pleaded; the girl drowned herself in tears, but the father stormed on. Poor Henri continued to peep over the fence at Loyette when she went milking, or met her clandestinely on the path behind the cow sheds, and everybody was wretched for months trying to make water run uphill. "Then Loyette confided in me. I had started to walk to the village and she had seen me cross the broad road and had followed. Poor child!--I can see her now, the tears streaming down her cheeks as she poured out her heart: how she and Henri had always loved each other; how fine and brave and truthful he was, and how kind and noble: she emptying her heart of her most precious secret--the story of her first love--a story, gentlemen"--here the marquise's voice dropped into tones of infinite sweetness--"which the angels bend their ears to catch, for there is nothing more holy nor more sublime.