y time you
should get fond of me too and ask for my hand, they gave their
approval beforehand, for they were sure that you would make me
happy.

"So they told Marie and Ernest, who, if ill came to them, would be
the heads of the family, that I had their consent to marry you. It
makes me happy to know this, Harry."

"I am very glad, too, dear," Harry said earnestly.

"It is very satisfactory for you, and it is very pleasant to me to
know that they were ready to trust you to me. Ah!" he said suddenly,
"that was what was in the letter. I wondered a little at the time,
for somehow after that, Jeanne, you were a little different with
me. I thought at first I might somehow have offended you. But I did
not think that long," he went on, as Jeanne uttered an indignant
exclamation, "because if anything offended you, you always spoke
out frankly. Still I wondered over it for some time, and certainly
I was never near guessing the truth."

"I could not help being a little different," Jeanne said shyly. "I
had never thought of it before, and though I am sure it made me
happy, I could not feel quite the same with you, especially as I
knew that you never thought of me like that."

"But you thought of me so afterwards, Jeanne?"

"Sometimes just for a moment, but I tried not to think of it,
Harry. We were so strangely placed, and it made it easier for you
to be a brother, and I felt sure you would not speak till we were
safely in England, and I was in Ernest's care. But," she said
with a little laugh, "you were nearly speaking that evening in the
cottage when you felt so despairing."

"Very nearly, Jeanne; I did so want comfort."

And so they talked happily together for an hour.

"I wonder Pierre does not come down to his boat," Harry said at
last. "There were several more things wanting doing to it. Why,
there he is calling. Surely it can never be dinner-time; but that's
what he says. It doesn't seem an hour since breakfast."

Jeanne hurried on into the hut.

"Why, Pierre," Harry said to the fisherman, who was waiting outside
for him, "I thought you were going on with your boat."

"So I was, monsieur, but Henriette told me I should be in the way."

"In the way, Pierre!" Harry repeated in surprise.

"Ah, monsieur," Pierre said with a twinkle in his eye, "you have
been deceiving us. My wife saw it in a moment when the young lady
came to breakfast.

"'Brother!' she said to me when you went out; 'don't tell me!
Monsieu