candle called an _oribus_ which is still used in
certain parts of western France.

Thus this rich old maid was nobility, pride, and grandeur personified.
At the moment when you are reading this portrait of her, the Abbe
Grimont has just indiscreetly revealed that on the evening when the
old baron, the young chevalier, and Gasselin secretly departed to join
MADAME (to the terror of the baroness and the great joy of all Bretons)
Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel had given the baron ten thousand francs
in gold,--an immense sacrifice, to which the abbe added another ten
thousand, a tithe collected by him,--charging the old hero to offer the
whole, in the name of the Pen-Hoels and of the parish of Guerande, to
the mother of Henri V.

Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel treated Calyste as if she felt that her
intentions gave her certain rights over him; her plans seemed to
authorize a supervision. Not that her ideas were strict in the matter of
gallantry, for she had, in fact, the usual indulgence of the old
women of the old school, but she held in horror the modern ways of
revolutionary morals. Calyste, who might have gained in her estimation
by a few adventures with Breton girls, would have lost it considerably
had she seen him entangled in what she called innovations. She might
have disinterred a little gold to pay for the results of a love-affair,
but if Calyste had driven a tilbury or talked of a visit to Paris she
would have thought him dissipated, and declared him a spendthrift.
Impossible to say what she might not have done had she found him reading
novels or an impious newspaper. To her, novel ideas meant the overthrow
of succession of crops, ruin under the name of improvements and methods;
in short, mortgaged lands as the inevitable result of experiments.
To her, prudence was the true method of making your fortune; good
management consisted in filling your granaries with wheat, rye, and
flax, and waiting for a rise at the risk of being called a monopolist,
and clinging to those grain-sacks obstinately. By singular chance she
had often made lucky sales which confirmed her principles. She was
thought to be maliciously clever, but in fact she was not quick-witted;
on the other hand, being as methodical as a Dutchman, prudent as a cat,
and persistent as a priest, those qualities in a region of routine like
Brittany were, practically, the equivalent of intellect.

"Will Monsieur du Halga join us this evening?" asked Mademoiselle de
Pen-