olonel, who bore the sight heroically and assumed a flattered air.

"If we are only four we can't play boston every night," said Sylvie.

"Why not? What do you suppose an old soldier of the Empire like me
does with himself? And as for Vinet, his evenings are always free.
Besides, you'll have plenty of other visitors; I warrant you that," he
added, with a rather mysterious air.

"What you ought to do," said Vinet, "is to take an open stand against
the ministerialists of Provins and form an opposition to them. You
would soon see how popular that would make you; you would have a
society about you at once. The Tiphaines would be furious at an
opposition salon. Well, well, why not laugh at others, if others laugh
at you?--and they do; the clique doesn't mince matters in talking
about you."

"How's that?" demanded Sylvie.

In the provinces there is always a valve or a faucet through which
gossip leaks from one social set to another. Vinet knew all the slurs
cast upon the Rogrons in the salons from which they were now excluded.
The deputy-judge and archaeologist Desfondrilles belonged to neither
party. With other independents like him, he repeated what he heard on
both sides and Vinet made the most of it. The lawyer's spiteful tongue
put venom into Madame Tiphaine's speeches, and by showing Rogron and
Sylvie the ridicule they had brought upon themselves he roused an
undying spirit of hatred in those bitter natures, which needed an
object for their petty passions.

A few days later Vinet brought his wife, a well-bred woman, neither
pretty nor plain, timid, very gentle, and deeply conscious of her
false position. Madame Vinet was fair-complexioned, faded by the cares
of her poor household, and very simply dressed. No woman could have
pleased Sylvie more. Madame Vinet endured her airs, and bent before
them like one accustomed to subjection. On the poor woman's rounded
brow and delicately timid cheek and in her slow and gentle glance,
were the traces of deep reflection, of those perceptive thoughts which
women who are accustomed to suffer bury in total silence.

The influence of the colonel (who now displayed to Sylvie the graces
of a courtier, in marked contradiction to his usual military
brusqueness), together with that of the astute Vinet, was soon to harm
the Breton child. Shut up in the house, no longer allowed to go out
except in company with her old cousin, Pierrette, that pretty little
squirrel, was at the mercy of