Pierrette a service, just as they had thought their harshness a benefit
to their apprentices.

Pierrette, whose true and noble and extreme sensibility was the
antipodes of the Rogrons' hardness, had a dread of being scolded; it
wounded her so sharply that the tears would instantly start in her
beautiful, pure eyes. She had a great struggle with herself before she
could repress the enchanting sprightliness which made her so great a
favorite elsewhere. After a time she displayed it only in the homes of
her little friends. By the end of the first month she had learned to be
passive in her cousins' house,--so much so that Rogron one day asked
her if she was ill. At that sudden question, she ran to the end of the
garden, and stood crying beside the river, into which her tears may have
fallen as she herself was about to fall into the social torrent.

One day, in spite of all her care, she tore her best reps frock at
Madame Tiphaine's, where she was spending a happy day. The poor child
burst into tears, foreseeing the cruel things which would be said to her
at home. Questioned by her friends, she let fall a few words about her
terrible cousin. Madame Tiphaine happened to have some reps exactly like
that of the frock, and she put in a new breadth herself. Mademoiselle
Rogron found out the trick, as she expressed it, which the little devil
had played her. From that day forth she refused to let Pierrette go to
any of "those women's" houses.

The life the poor girl led in Provins was divided into three distinct
phases. The first, already shown, in which she had some joy mingled
with the cold kindness of her cousins and their sharp reproaches, lasted
three months. Sylvie's refusal to let her go to her little friends,
backed by the necessity of beginning her education, ended the first
phase of her life at Provins, the only period when that life was
bearable to her.

These events, produced at the Rogrons by Pierrette's presence, were
studied by Vinet and the colonel with the caution of foxes preparing to
enter a poultry-yard and disturbed by seeing a strange fowl. They both
called from time to time,--but seldom, so as not to alarm the old maid;
they talked with Rogron under various pretexts, and made themselves
masters of his mind with an affectation of reserve and modesty which the
great Tartuffe himself would have respected. The colonel and the lawyer
were spending the evening with Rogron on the very day when Sylvie
had refuse