Janey put her two hands behind her, and fixed him with two glittering eyes. “I am afraid I shall see you again, but I wish I never might,” she cried. “You are a bad, bad, _horrible_ old man!” “And you, you are a _charmante petite demoiselle_,” said M. Goudron, grinning at her till his old face seemed cut in two. CHAPTER XII. The day of the _tirage au sort_ was not one which could be spent like other days, after the supreme excitement of the morning. There was a great deal of wine consumed in Latour, and a perfect babel of talk. It soon became known in the village, after a great many excited communications between the Lion d’Or and M. Goudron’s house, that _l’Anglais_ had offered to procure a substitute for Baptiste. At first the little eager world was incredulous of such an extraordinary announcement. _L’Anglais!_ a stranger, one who had nothing to do with the Duprés or the Goudrons, or even with the district, or any interest in the Lion d’Or! but it was very evident that something was going on in which the stranger and Baptiste and Blanchette and all their respective families were involved. Madame Dupré, who had been assisted to her room by a whole assembly of weeping and sympathetic neighbours, had been disinterred from the midst of them and conducted across the street by Baptiste, very solemn and pale, yet with an expression quite different from the despair on his face when he had come home from the Mairie with his fatal number. It was Blanchette who, laughing, crying, with the tears on her cheeks and a voice broken with sobs, yet an extraordinary gleam of happiness about her, had flown across the street, light as a bird, to call them. They had all disappeared into the rooms on the ground-floor, where there had been a tumult of talking and crying, two or three voices audible together, a thing never heard before since the English family, who spoke, the Latourois thought, almost in whispers, had taken possession. And then the Curé had been sent for; and M. le Maire himself, coming home after presiding officially over the business of the day, still with his scarf on, and in all the pride of office, had stepped in. This diverted the attention of many from the noisy youths who had escaped, and who were celebrating their freedom--and from those who had been drawn, and who were trying to forget it and drown their despair. And when Madame Dupré came back, a changed woman, her head high, her countenance radiant, the whole community was stirred. It was true then? Many were the wistful women who crossed the road after, and hung about the door, and cast anxious looks at the window. Why should Baptiste Dupré be the only one to be delivered? _L’Anglais_ probably did it out of mere eccentricity, they thought, not out of regard to Baptiste, and no doubt he was enormously rich, and did not know what to do with his money; and if he bought back Baptiste, why not Jean and Pierre? The mothers of Jean and Pierre, who had drawn the numbers 2 and