ver roving over the
furniture and under it, and you could as soon have found a tender spot
in her heart as a bit of fluff under the sofa.

After the remarks made at Madame Tiphaine's, Sylvie dared not flinch
from the three hundred francs for Pierrette's clothes. During the first
week her time was wholly taken up, and Pierrette's too, by frocks to
order and try on, chemises and petticoats to cut out and have made by a
seamstress who went out by the day. Pierrette did not know how to sew.

"That's pretty bringing up!" said Rogron. "Don't you know how to do
anything, little girl?"

Pierrette, who knew nothing but how to love, made a pretty, childish
gesture.

"What did you do in Brittany?" asked Rogron.

"I played," she answered, naively. "Everybody played with me. Grandmamma
and grandpapa they told me stories. Ah! they all loved me!"

"Hey!" said Rogron; "didn't you take it easy!"

Pierrette opened her eyes wide, not comprehending.

"She is as stupid as an owl," said Sylvie to Mademoiselle Borain, the
best seamstress in Provins.

"She's so young," said the workwoman, looking kindly at Pierrette, whose
delicate little muzzle was turned up to her with a coaxing look.

Pierrette preferred the sewing-women to her relations. She was endearing
in her ways with them, she watched their work, and made them those
pretty speeches that seem like the flowers of childhood, and which her
cousin had already silenced, for that gaunt woman loved to impress
those under her with salutary awe. The sewing-women were delighted with
Pierrette. Their work, however, was not carried on without many and loud
grumblings.

"That child will make us pay through the nose!" cried Sylvie to her
brother.

"Stand still, my dear, and don't plague us; it is all for you and not
for me," she would say to Pierrette when the child was being measured.
Sometimes it was, when Pierrette would ask the seamstress some question,
"Let Mademoiselle Borain do her work, and don't talk to her; it is not
you who are paying for her time."

"Mademoiselle," said Mademoiselle Borain, "am I to back-stitch this?"

"Yes, do it firmly; I don't want to be making such an outfit as this
every day."

Sylvie put the same spirit of emulation into Pierrette's outfit that
she had formerly put into the house. She was determined that her cousin
should be as well dressed as Madame Garceland's little girl. She
bought the child fashionable boots of bronzed kid like those the lit