"Vive Napoleon." Her brow was troubled, and she perched her head on this
side and on that, as she tried to guess what the dwarf had meant. At
last she sat down on a bench at the door of her home, and the summer
afternoon spent its glories on her; for the sunflowers and the
hollyhocks were round her, and the warmth gave her face a shining health
and joyousness. There she brooded till she heard the voice of her mother
calling across the meadow; then she got up with a sigh, and softly
repeated Parpon's words: "He is a great man!"

In the middle of that night she started up from a sound sleep, and, with
a little cry, whispered into the silence: "Napoleon--Napoleon!"

She was thinking of Valmond. A revelation had come to her out of her
dreams. But she laughed at it, and buried her face in her pillow and
went to sleep, hoping to dream again.

CHAPTER III

In less than one week Valmond was as outstanding from Pontiac as
Dalgrothe Mountain, just beyond it in the south. His liberality, his
jocundity, his occasional abstraction, his meditative pose, were all
his own; his humour that of the people. He was too quick in repartee
and drollery for a bourgeois, too "near to the bone" in point for
an aristocrat, with his touch of the comedian and the peasant also.
Besides, he was mysterious and picturesque, and this is alluring to
women and to the humble, if not to all the world. It might be his was
the comedian's fascination, but the flashes of grotesqueness rather
pleased the eye than hurt the taste of Pontiac.

Only in one quarter was there hesitation, added to an anxiety almost
painful; for to doubt Monsieur Valmond would have shocked the sense
of courtesy so dear to Monsieur the Cure, Monsieur Garon, the Little
Chemist, and even Medallion the auctioneer, who had taken into his
bluff, odd nature something of the spirit of those old-fashioned
gentlemen. Monsieur De la Riviere, the young Seigneur, had to be
reckoned with independently.

It was their custom to meet once a week, at the house of one or another,
for a "causerie," as the avocat called it. On the Friday evening of
this particular week, all were seated in the front garden of the Cure's
house, as Valmond came over the hill, going towards the Louis Quinze.
His step was light, his head laid slightly to one side, as if in pleased
and inquiring reverie, and there was a lifting of one corner of the
mouth, suggesting an amused disdain. Was it that disdain which come