ut you've got the appetite of a monk."

The only person who did not bruise the delicate little flower was the
fat servant woman, Adele. Adele would go up and warm her bed,--doing
it on the sly after a certain evening when Sylvie had scolded her for
giving that comfort to the child.

"Children should be hardened, to give them strong constitutions. Am I
and my brother the worse for it?" said Sylvie. "You'll make Pierrette a
_peakling_"; this was a word in the Rogron vocabulary which meant a puny
and suffering little being.

The naturally endearing ways of the angelic child were treated as
dissimulation. The fresh, pure blossoms of affection which bloomed
instinctively in that young soul were pitilessly crushed. Pierrette
suffered many a cruel blow on the tender flesh of her heart. If she
tried to soften those ferocious natures by innocent, coaxing wiles they
accused her of doing it with an object. "Tell me at once what you want?"
Rogron would say, brutally; "you are not coaxing me for nothing."

Neither brother nor sister believed in affection, and Pierrette's whole
being was affection. Colonel Gouraud, anxious to please Mademoiselle
Rogron, approved of all she did about Pierrette. Vinet also encouraged
them in what they said against her. He attributed all her so-called
misdeeds to the obstinacy of the Breton character, and declared that
no power, no will, could ever conquer it. Rogron and his sister were so
shrewdly flattered by the two manoeuvrers that the former agreed to go
security for the "Courrier de Provins," and the latter invested five
thousand francs in the enterprise.

On this, the colonel and lawyer took the field. They got a hundred
shares, of five hundred francs each, taken among the farmers and others
called independents, and also among those who had bought lands of the
national domains,--whose fears they worked upon. They even extended
their operations throughout the department and along its borders.
Each shareholder of course subscribed to the paper. The judicial
advertisements were divided between the "Bee-hive" and the "Courrier."
The first issue of the latter contained a pompous eulogy on Rogron. He
was presented to the community as the Laffitte of Provins. The public
mind having thus received an impetus in this new direction, it was
manifest, of course, that the coming elections would be contested.
Madame Tiphaine, whose highest hope was to take her husband to Paris as
deputy, was in despair. Af