s a box-sofa, on which Marie
had slept since she was a child, and which with a small table, two
chairs and a stool, completed the furniture of the room; the only light
was that admitted by the doorway, the door nearly always standing open;
the lean-to was little more than a dog-kennel, being formed in fact out
of a great heap of stones and rubbish, which had been piled up as a
protection to the cottage on the windward side; and three dogs and two
hens were enjoying themselves in front of the fire.

It was here that Marie had lived, ever since she could remember, in
close and contented companionship with her father: whom indeed,
especially since he had the fever which crippled him three years before,
she had fed, clothed, nursed and guarded with a care almost more
motherly than filial.

CHAPTER II.

Marie was leaning over the low wall of a cottage garden in the
'village,' as a clump of small houses at the meeting of four cross-roads
was called, and waiting for the kail which she had come to buy for the
evening's soup from Mrs. Nevin, who cultivated a little plot of ground
with fruit and vegetables. The back-door of the cottage, which opened on
the garden, was ajar, and she could hear some one enter from the front
with a heavy tread, and call out in a big, jovial voice, "Hullo, Mother,
we're in luck to-day! You'd never guess who's goin' to take me on. Lame
Andre, he's goin' to give Pierre the sack, and says he'll have me for a
time or two to try. Says I'm strong in the shoulders, and he guesses I
can do him more good than Pierre. I should think I easy could too, a
pinch-faced whipper-snapper like that!"

"And high time it is too that Andre had his eyes opened," rejoined Mrs.
Nevin; "often it is I've told Marie, as there she stands, that her
father don't ought to trust the fish-sellin' too much to that Pierre: a
lad as could rob his own grandmother the moment the life was out o' her
body."

"Well, Mother, you've often told me about that five franc piece, but
nobody can't say that she hadn't given it him before she died, as he
said--"

"Given it him, I should think so, when she never would have aught to say
to him for all his wheedling ways, and his brother Jacques was her
favourite; and poor old lady if she'd a known that Pierre was goin' to
be alone with her, when she went off suddint in a fit, I guess she'd a
locked up her purse first, I do."

"Well, I must say he turned a queer colour when he heard Andre say