doctor, after feeling the head for a long
time and questioning Pierrette on her sufferings. "You must tell us all,
my child, so that we may know how to cure you. Why is your hand like
this? You could not have given yourself that wound."

Pierrette related the struggle between herself and her cousin Sylvie.

"Make her talk," said the doctor to the grandmother, "and find out the
whole truth. I will await the arrival of the doctor from Paris; and we
will send for the surgeon in charge of the hospital here, and have a
consultation. The case seems to me a very serious one. Meantime I will
send you a quieting draught so that mademoiselle may sleep; she needs
sleep."

Left alone with her granddaughter the old Breton woman exerted her
influence over the child and made her tell all; she let her know that
she had money enough now for all three, and promised that Brigaut should
live with them. The poor girl admitted her martyrdom, not imagining the
events to which her admissions would give rise. The monstrosity of two
beings without affection and without conception of family life opened to
the old woman a world of woe as far from her knowledge as the morals
of savages may have seemed to the first discoverers who set foot in
America.

The arrival of her grandmother, the certainty of living with her in
comfort soothed Pierrette's mind as the sleeping draught soothed her
body. The old woman watched her darling, kissing her forehead, hair, and
hands, as the holy women of old kissed the hands of Jesus when they laid
him in the tomb.

IX. THE FAMILY COUNCIL

At nine o'clock that morning Monsieur Martener went to see Monsieur
Tiphaine, and related to him the scene between Pierrette and Sylvie, and
the tortures of all kinds, moral and physical, to which the Rogrons
had subjected their cousin, and the two alarming forms of illness which
their cruelty had developed. Monsieur Tiphaine sent for Auffray the
notary, one of Pierrette's own relations on the maternal side.

At this particular time the war between the Vinet party and the Tiphaine
party was at its height. The scandals which the Rogrons and their
adherents were disseminating through the town about the liaison of
Madame Tiphaine's mother with the banker du Tillet, and the bankruptcy
of her father (a forger, they said), were all the more exasperating to
the Tiphaines because these things were malicious truths, not libels.
Such wounds cut deep; they go to the quick of fe