“Oh, _les pauvres_! Yes, yes; they are kind enough. When one is ill they will come and demand, ‘What can one do for you?’ It is true, mademoiselle; but one does not like to have it thus forced upon one brutally that others are better off than one’s self. That humbles you. I prefer, for my part, that they should not interfere. _Assez!_ let us talk of something else,” said Margot, taking up her _plumet_, which in her fervour she had allowed to drop from her hand. This was the worst of Margot’s ministrations. When she became interested in the conversation, the feather-brush always dropped and the dusting was suspended. As for Helen, she felt her world widening around her. She forgot the strange sentiments she had been hearing, and the strange position in which she found herself. On one hand, there was little Blanchette with her story; and on the other, the young ladies at the _château_, who spoke English. Her heart filled with excitement and hope. They were nothing to her, but they opened once more the ordinary world, and delivered her from her own tribulations and thoughts. CHAPTER VIII. Helen and her little sister were left very much to themselves for some time after they settled in M. Goudron’s house, and the village life going on round them soon became interesting and important to the strangers. Little Janey played all day long with Marie and Petit-Jean, and acquired a Burgundian accent, and an ease of speech much beyond that of Helen, who still talked as with a shadow behind her of her governess, and was tremulous about her genders, and afraid of the subjunctive mood. It was wonderful how soon they came to know the stories which hid under each little thatched roof. Though Helen did not dare in the face of public opinion to unfasten the closely strained curtain that covered her windows, she managed to draw its fulness towards the centre, leaving a little corner by which she could see what was going on. The chief thing she saw, it must be allowed, was old Goudron standing at the door watching everything that went on with his hungry old eyes, and grinning with malicious pleasure at every mishap. Nothing escaped the old man, and his grin was the chief thing in Latour which soured the milk of human kindness, made the good wives cross, they could not tell why, and exasperated the men. He was always there with malignant and mocking words whatever happened, to say that “I told you so”--which makes every misfortune a little more unbearable;--“if you had listened to me.” The house next door was the only house in the village which made any pretensions to gentility. M. le Précepteur who lived in it was not a schoolmaster, as the English reader may suppose, but the collector of taxes, a Government _employé_, who held on with a very stern clutch to the skirts of the aristocracy, as a man well born, with a wife who found herself sadly out of place in this desert. When madame went by in her pretty toilets, M. Goudron had always a gibe.