ll over the parish on my pony alone."

"Stupid of me!" ejaculated Willan, inwardly: "as if these people could
know any scruples about etiquette!"

"These people," as Willan contemptuously called them, stood at the door
of the inn, and watched him riding away with Victorine with hardly
disguised exultation. Not till the riders were fairly out of sight did
Victor venture to turn his face toward Jeanne's. Then, bursting into a
loud laugh, he clapped Jeanne on the shoulder, and said: "We'll see thee
grandmother of thy husband's grandchildren yet, Jeanne. Ha! ha!"

Jeanne flushed. She was not without a sense of shame. Her love for
Victorine made her sensitive to the stain on her birth.

"Thinkest thou it could ever be known?" she asked anxiously.

"Never," replied her father,--"never; 'tis as safe as if we were all
dead. And for that, the living are safer than the dead, if there be
tight enough lock on their mouths."

"He doth seem to be as much in love as one need," said Jeanne.

"Ay," said Victor, "more than ever his father was with thee."

"Canst thou not let that alone?" said Jeanne, angrily. "Surely it is
long enough gone by, and small profit came of it."

"Not so, not so, daughter," replied Victor, soothingly; "if we can but
set the girl in thy shoes, thou didst not wear thine for nought, even
though they pinched thee for a time."

"That they did," retorted Jeanne; "it gives me a cramp now but to
remember them."

Willan and Victorine galloped merrily along the river road. The woods
were sweet with spring fragrances; great thickets of dogwood trees were
white with flowers; mossy hillocks along the roadside were pink with the
dainty bells of the Linnaea. The road was little more than a woodman's
path, and curved now right, now left, in seeming caprice; now forded a
stream, now came out into a cleared field, again plunged back into dense
groves of larch and pine.

"Never knew I that the woods were so beautiful thus early in the year,"
said the honest Willan.

"Nor I, till to-day," said the artful Victorine, who knew well enough
what Willan did not know himself.

"Dost thou ride here alone?" asked Willan. "It is a wild place for thee
to be alone."

"If I came not alone, I could not come at all," replied Victorine,
sorrowfully. "My grandfather is too busy, and my aunt likes not to ride
except she must, on a market day or to go to church. No one but thou
hast ever walked or ridden with me," she added in a l