The person who now entered was a girl of about eighteen, short, and very
much deformed. Though not exactly a hunchback, her spine was curved; her
breast was sunken, and her head deeply set in the shoulders. Her face was
regular, but long, thin, very pale, and pitted with the small pox; yet it
expressed great sweetness and melancholy. Her blue eyes beamed with
kindness and intelligence. By a strange freak of nature, the handsomest
woman would have been proud of the magnificent hair twisted in a coarse
net at the back of her head. She held an old basket in her hand. Though
miserably clad, the care and neatness of her dress revealed a powerful
struggle with her poverty. Notwithstanding the cold, she wore a scanty
frock made of print of an indefinable color, spotted with white; but it
had been so often washed, that its primitive design and color had long
since disappeared. In her resigned, yet suffering face, might be read a
long familiarity with every form of suffering, every description of
taunting. From her birth, ridicule had ever pursued her. We have said
that she was very deformed, and she was vulgarly called "Mother Bunch."
Indeed it was so usual to give her this grotesque name, which every
moment reminded her of her infirmity, that Frances and Agricola, though
they felt as much compassion as other people showed contempt for her,
never called her, however, by any other name.

Mother Bunch, as we shall therefore call her in future, was born in the
house in which Dagobert's wife had resided for more than twenty years;
and she had, as it were, been brought up with Agricola and Gabriel.

There are wretches fatally doomed to misery. Mother Bunch had a very
pretty sister, on whom Perrine Soliveau, their common mother, the widow
of a ruined tradesman, had concentrated all her affection, while she
treated her deformed child with contempt and unkindness. The latter would
often come, weeping, to Frances, on this account, who tried to console
her, and in the long evenings amused her by teaching her to read and sew.
Accustomed to pity her by their mother's example, instead of imitating
other children, who always taunted and sometimes even beat her, Agricola
and Gabriel liked her, and used to protect and defend her.

She was about fifteen, and her sister Cephyse was about seventeen, when
their mother died, leaving them both in utter poverty. Cephyse was
intelligent, active, clever, but different to her sister; she had the
li