e francs from the prisoner.

"_Au revoir!_" laughed back Marianne, but the words were faint, for the
last car was snaking around the bend.

Thus Marianne went to jail. Now that she is back, she takes her return
as carelessly and unblushingly as a _demi-mondaine_ does her annual
return from Dinard.

When Marianne was eighteen, they tell me, she was the prettiest girl in
Pont du Sable, that is to say, she was prettier than Emilienne Daget at
Bar la Rose, or than Berthe Pavoisier, the daughter of the miller at
Tocqueville, who is now in Paris. At eighteen, Marianne was slim and
blonde; moreover, she was as bold as a hawk, and smiled as easily as
she lied. At twenty, she was rated as a valuable member of any fishing
crew that put out from the coast, for they found her capable during a
catch, and steady in danger, always doing her share and a little more
for those who could not help themselves. She is still doing it, for in
her stone hut on the edge of the marsh that serves as shelter for her
children and her rough old self, she has been charitable and given a
winter's lodging to three old wrecks of the sea. There are no beds, but
there are bunks filled with marsh-hay; there is no furniture, but there
are a few pots and pans, and in one corner of the dirt floor, a
crackling fire of drift wood, and nearly always enough applejack for
all, and now and then hot soup. Marianne wrenches these luxuries, so to
speak, out of the sea, often alone and single-handed, working as hard as
a gull to feed her young.

The cure was right; Marianne had her good qualities--I was almost
beginning to wonder to myself as I pulled drowsily at the black pipe if
her good qualities did not outweigh her bad ones, when the Essence of
Selfishness awakened and yawned. And so it was high time to send this
spoiled child of mine to bed.

* * * * *

Marianne called her "_ma belle petite_," though her real name was
Yvonne--Yvonne Louise Tourneveau.

Yvonne kept her black eyes from early dawn until dark upon a dozen of
the Pere Bourron's cows in her charge, who grazed on a long point of the
marsh, lush with salt grass, that lay sheltered back of the dunes
fronting the open sea.

Now and then, when a cow strayed over the dunes on to the hard beach
beyond to gaze stupidly at the breakers, the little girl's voice would
become as authoritative as a boy's. "_Eh ben, tu sais!_" she would shout
as she ran to head the straggler o