eal quite pretty, I am sure; and I will
manage to sell your bronze group, you will see; you will have paid me
off, you will be able to do as you please, you will soon be free. Come,
smile a little!"

"I can never repay you, mademoiselle," said the exile.

"And why not?" asked the peasant woman, taking the Livonian's part
against herself.

"Because you not only fed me, lodged me, cared for me in my poverty, but
you also gave me strength. You have made me what I am; you have often
been stern, you have made me very unhappy----"

"I?" said the old maid. "Are you going to pour out all your nonsense
once more about poetry and the arts, and to crack your fingers and
stretch your arms while you spout about the ideal, and beauty, and all
your northern madness?--Beauty is not to compare with solid pudding--and
what am I!--You have ideas in your brain? What is the use of them? I too
have ideas. What is the good of all the fine things you may have in your
soul if you can make no use of them? Those who have ideas do not get so
far as those who have none, if they don't know which way to go.

"Instead of thinking over your ideas you must work.--Now, what have you
done while I was out?"

"What did your pretty cousin say?"

"Who told you she was pretty?" asked Lisbeth sharply, in a tone hollow
with tiger-like jealousy.

"Why, you did."

"That was only to see your face. Do you want to go trotting after
petticoats? You who are so fond of women, well, make them in bronze.
Let us see a cast of your desires, for you will have to do without the
ladies for some little time yet, and certainly without my cousin, my
good fellow. She is not game for your bag; that young lady wants a man
with sixty thousand francs a year--and has found him!

"Why, your bed is not made!" she exclaimed, looking into the adjoining
room. "Poor dear boy, I quite forgot you!"

The sturdy woman pulled off her gloves, her cape and bonnet, and remade
the artist's little camp bed as briskly as any housemaid. This mixture
of abruptness, of roughness even, with real kindness, perhaps accounts
for the ascendency Lisbeth had acquired over the man whom she regarded
as her personal property. Is not our attachment to life based on its
alternations of good and evil?

If the Livonian had happened to meet Madame Marneffe instead of Lisbeth
Fischer, he would have found a protectress whose complaisance must have
led him into some boggy or discreditable path, where he woul