"So the months passed on, till they grew into years, and still Edmee was living like a simple country maiden with her kind friends. They did all in their power to prevent her feeling the change in her position. The good cure gave her daily lessons, such as her mother would have wished her to have, and the Germains managed to turn an outhouse which had been used for storing apples and such things into a pretty little sitting-room for her, where they collected the very few pieces of furniture that had been saved from the chateau, several of which are now in the room where I am writing--the best room at Belle Prairie Farm. And Edmee gradually recovered some of her old brightness; she felt that she was where her mother would have wished her to be, and she was by nature of a wise and unworldly spirit. Even the destruction of her old home she learned to view in a way that was very different from the feelings of most of her class. "`We ourselves--we Valmonts--may not have sinned as others,' she said one day to the cure, when he had been explaining to her some of the causes of this dreadful Revolution which had so changed the face of the country, `but our class was guilty. And we have suffered for their sins. Is it not so, dear Monsieur?' "And the old man's own eyes filled with tears, as he looked at her earnest ones upraised to his. "`It is even so, my child.' "`Then I pray God to accept the sacrifice!' said the child. `But, Monsieur le Cure, I do not wish to be an aristocrat any more. I will belong to my own people.' "And to this, through all the years that followed, she remained firm. Even when distant relations, hearing of her escape, wrote from England, begging her to join them there, with good hope of before long returning to their own home in France, promising, poor as she now was, to adopt her as their own child, Edmee wrote decidedly, though gratefully, refusing. She had made her choice. Some years later, thanks to the efforts of all the most esteemed among the inhabitants of Valmont, a small portion of her forefathers' possessions, which had been divided and sold, like scores of other properties, was restored to Edmee, and as the owner of the Belle Prairie Farm, she was able to do something in return for the kind friends who had sheltered her in her desolation. The whole family removed there, and you can fancy that it was a happy day for Edmee when she received her kind foster-parents under her own roof.