ned. They decided to refuse
the Lorrain request. Sylvie agreed to write the answer. Business being
rather urgent just then she delayed writing, and the forewoman coming
forward with an offer for the stock and good-will of the "Family
Sister," which the brother and sister accepted, the matter went entirely
out of the old maid's mind.

Sylvie Rogron and her brother departed for Provins four years before the
time when the coming of Brigaut threw such excitement into Pierrette's
life. But the doings of the pair after their arrival at Provins are as
necessary to relate as their life in Paris; for Provins was destined to
be not less fatal to Pierrette than the commercial antecedents of her
cousins!

III. PATHOLOGY OF RETIRED MERCERS

When the petty shopkeeper who has come to Paris from the provinces
returns to the provinces from Paris he brings with him a few ideas; then
he loses them in the habits and ways of provincial life into which he
plunges, and his reforming notions leave him. From this there do result,
however, certain trifling, slow, successive changes by which Paris
scratches the surface of the provincial towns. This process marks the
transition of the ex-shopkeeper into the substantial bourgeois, but
it acts like an illness upon him. No retail shopkeeper can pass with
impunity from his perpetual chatter into dead silence, from his Parisian
activity to the stillness of provincial life. When these worthy persons
have laid by property they spend a portion of it on some desire
over which they have long brooded and into which they now turn their
remaining impulses, no longer restrained by force of will. Those who
have not been nursing a fixed idea either travel or rush into the
political interests of their municipality. Others take to hunting
or fishing and torment their farmers or tenants; others again become
usurers or stock-jobbers. As for the scheme of the Rogrons, brother and
sister, we know what that was; they had to satisfy an imperious desire
to handle the trowel and remodel their old house into a charming new
one.

This fixed idea produced upon the square of Lower Provins the front
of the building which Brigaut had been examining; also the interior
arrangements of the house and its handsome furniture. The contractor did
not drive a nail without consulting the owners, without requiring them
to sign the plans and specifications, without explaining to them at full
length and in every detail the nature