s the matter?" asked Sylvie, severely.

"Nothing," said the poor child, going up to Rogron.

"Nothing?" said Sylvie, "that's nonsense; nobody cries for nothing."

"What is it, my little darling?" said Madame Vinet.

"My rich cousin isn't as kind to me as my poor grandmother was," sobbed
Pierrette.

"Your grandmother took your money," said Sylvie, "and your cousin will
leave you hers."

The colonel and the lawyer glanced at each other.

"I would rather be robbed and loved," said Pierrette.

"Then you shall be sent back whence you came."

"But what has the dear little thing done?" asked Madame Vinet.

Vinet gave his wife the terrible, fixed, cold look with which men
enforce their absolute dominion. The hapless helot, punished incessantly
for not having the one thing that was wanted of her, a fortune, took up
her cards.

"What has she done?" said Sylvie, throwing up her head with such
violence that the yellow wall-flowers in her cap nodded. "She is always
looking about to annoy us. She opened my watch to see the inside, and
meddled with the wheel and broke the mainspring. Mademoiselle pays no
heed to what is said to her. I am all day long telling her to take care
of things, and I might just as well talk to that lamp."

Pierrette, ashamed at being reproved before strangers, crept softly out
of the room.

"I am thinking all the time how to subdue that child," said Rogron.

"Isn't she old enough to go to school?" asked Madame Vinet.

Again she was silenced by a look from her husband, who had been careful
to tell her nothing of his own or the colonel's schemes.

"This is what comes of taking charge of other people's children!" cried
the colonel. "You may still have some of your own, you or your brother.
Why don't you both marry?"

Sylvie smiled agreeably on the colonel. For the first time in her life
she met a man to whom the idea that she could marry did not seem absurd.

"Madame Vinet is right," cried Rogron; "perhaps teaching would keep
Pierrette quiet. A master wouldn't cost much."

The colonel's remark so preoccupied Sylvie that she made no answer to
her brother.

"If you are willing to be security for that opposition journal I was
talking to you about," said Vinet, "you will find an excellent master
for the little cousin in the managing editor; we intend to engage that
poor schoolmaster who lost his employment through the encroachments of
the clergy. My wife is right; Pierrette is a rough diamond