ille and rewarded his
agent with the gift of a modest little house in the rue Royale. The
poor toiler had brought back from New York, together with his cottons,
a pretty little wife, attracted it would seem by his French nature. Miss
Grummer was worth about four thousand dollars (twenty thousand francs),
which sum Dumay placed with his colonel, to whom he now became an alter
ego. In a short time he learned to keep his patron's books, a science
which, to use his own expression, pertains to the sergeant-majors of
commerce. The simple-hearted soldier, whom fortune had forgotten for
twenty years, thought himself the happiest man in the world as the owner
of the little house (which his master's liberality had furnished), with
twelve hundred francs a year from money in the funds, and a salary of
three thousand six hundred. Never in his dreams had Lieutenant Dumay
hoped for a situation so good as this; but greater still was the
satisfaction he derived from the knowledge that his lucky enterprise had
been the pivot of good fortune to the richest commercial house in Havre.

Madame Dumay, a rather pretty little American, had the misfortune to
lose all her children at their birth; and her last confinement was so
disastrous as to deprive her of the hope of any other. She therefore
attached herself to the two little Mignons, whom Dumay himself loved,
or would have loved, even better than his own children had they lived.
Madame Dumay, whose parents were farmers accustomed to a life of
economy, was quite satisfied to receive only two thousand four hundred
francs of her own and her household expenses; so that every year Dumay
laid by two thousand and some extra hundreds with the house of Mignon.
When the yearly accounts were made up the colonel always added something
to this little store by way of acknowledging the cashier's services,
until in 1824 the latter had a credit of fifty-eight thousand francs. In
was then that Charles Mignon, Comte de La Bastie, a title he never used,
crowned his cashier with the final happiness of residing at the Chalet,
where at the time when this story begins Madame Mignon and her daughter
were living in obscurity.

The deplorable state of Madame Mignon's health was caused in part by the
catastrophe to which the absence of her husband was due. Grief had taken
three years to break down the docile German woman; but it was a grief
that gnawed at her heart like a worm at the core of a sound fruit. It
is easy