ght and gave her everything she needed and wished for; so that even
when she wanted to give alms to a beggar, the girl felt in her mother's
pocket for the coin.

"If that's so," remarked the hatmaker, "she can't cost you much."

"So you think, do you?" replied Sauviat. "You wouldn't get off under
forty crowns a year, I can tell you that. Why, her room, she has at
least a hundred crowns' worth of furniture in it! But when a man has but
one child, he doesn't mind. The little we own will all go to her."

"The little! Why, you must be rich, pere Sauviat! It is pretty nigh
forty years that you have been doing a business in which there are no
losses."

"Ha! I sha'n't go to the poorhouse for want of a thousand francs or so!"
replied the old-iron dealer.

From the day when Veronique lost the soft beauty which made her girlish
face the admiration of all who saw it, Pere Sauviat redoubled in
activity. His business became so prosperous that he now went to Paris
several times a year. Every one felt that he wanted to compensate his
daughter by force of money for what he called her "loss of profit."
When Veronique was fifteen years old a change was made in the internal
manners and customs of the household. The father and mother went
upstairs in the evenings to their daughter's apartment, where Veronique
would read to them, by the light of a lamp placed behind a glass globe
full of water, the "Vie des Saints," the "Lettres Edifiantes," and other
books lent by the vicar. Madame Sauviat knitted stockings, feeling that
she thus recouped herself for the cost of oil. The neighbors could see
through the window the old couple seated motionless in their armchairs,
like Chinese images, listening to their daughter, and admiring her with
all the powers of their contracted minds, obtuse to everything that was
not business or religious faith.

II. VERONIQUE

There are, no doubt, many young girls in the world as pure as Veronique,
but none purer or more modest. Her confessions might have surprised the
angels and rejoiced the Blessed Virgin.

At sixteen years of age she was fully developed, and appeared the woman
she was eventually to become. She was of medium height, neither her
father nor her mother being tall; but her figure was charming in its
graceful suppleness, and in the serpentine curves laboriously sought by
painters and sculptors,--curves which Nature herself draws so delicately
with her lissom outlines, revealed to the eye