the least mind spending a few dollars here and there to make things
tidier and more comfortable.

A few weeks after Jeanne's return to the inn there appeared in the
family a new and by no means insignificant member. This was the young
Victorine Dubois, who was a daughter, they said, of Victor Dubois's son
Jean, the twin brother of Jeanne. He had gone to Montreal many years
ago, and had been moderately prosperous there as a wine-seller in a
small way. He had been dead now for two years, and his widow, being
about to marry again, was anxious to get the young Victorine off her
hands. So the story ran, and on the surface it looked probable enough.
But Montreal was not a great way off from the parish of St. Urbans, in
which stood Victor Dubois's inn; there were men coming and going often
who knew the city, and who looked puzzled when it was said in their
hearing that Victorine was the eldest child of Jean Dubois the
wine-seller. She had been kept at a convent all these years, old Victor
said, her father being determined that at least one of his children
should be well educated.

Nobody could gainsay this, and Mademoiselle Victorine certainly had the
air of having been much better trained and taught than most girls in her
station. But somehow, nobody quite knew why, the tale of her being Jean
Dubois's daughter was not believed. Suspicions and at last rumors were
afloat that she was an illegitimate child of Jeanne's, born a few years
before her marriage to Willan Blaycke.

Nothing easier, everybody knew, than for Mistress Willan Blaycke to
have supported half a dozen illegitimate children, if she had had them,
on the money her husband gave her so lavishly; and there was old Victor,
as ready and unscrupulous a go-between as ever an unscrupulous woman
needed. These rumors gained all the easier credence because Victorine
bore so striking a resemblance to her "Aunt Jeanne." On the other hand,
this ought not to have been taken as proof any more one way than the
other; for there were plenty of people who recollected very well that in
the days when little Jean and Jeanne toddled about together as children,
nobody but their mother could tell them apart, except by their clothes.
So the winds of gossiping breaths blew both ways at once in the matter,
and it was much discussed for a time. But like all scandals, as soon as
it became an old story nobody cared whether it were false or true; and
before Victorine had been a year at the Gol