armers--only farmers--and Madame Lavilette made no remarkable
impression. Her dress was florid and not in excellent taste, and her
accent was rather crude. Sophie had gone to school at the convent in the
city, but she had no ambition. She had inherited the stolid simplicity
of her English grandfather. When her schooling was finished she let her
school friends drop, and came back to Bonaventure, rather stately, given
to reading, and little inclined to bother her head about anybody.

Christine, the younger sister, had gone to Quebec also, but after a week
of rebellion, bad temper and sharp speaking, had come home again without
ceremony, and refused to return. Despite certain likenesses to her
mother, she had a deep, if unintelligible, admiration for her father,
and she never tired looking at the picture of her great-grandfather in
the dress of a chevalier of St. Louis--almost the only thing that had
been saved from the old Manor House, destroyed so long before her time.
Perhaps it was the importance she attached to her ancestry which made
her impatient with their present position, and with people in the parish
who would not altogether recognise their claims. It was that which made
her give a little jerky bow to the miller and the postmaster when she
passed the mill.

"Come, dusty-belly," said Baby, "what's all this pom-pom of the
Lavilettes?"

The miller pursed out his lips, contracted his brows, and arranged his
loose waistcoat carefully on his fat stomach.

"Money," said he, oracularly, as though he had solved the great question
of the universe.

"La! la! But other folks have money; and they step about Bonaventure no
more louder than a cat."

"Blood," added Gatineau, corrugating his brows still more.

"Bosh!"

"Both together--money and blood," rejoined the miller. Overcome by his
exertions, he wheezed so tremendously that great billows of excitement
raised his waistcoat, and a perspiration broke out upon his mealy face,
making a paste which the sun, through the open doorway, immediately
began to bake into a crust.

"Pah, the airs they have always had, those Lavilettes!" said Baby. "They
will not do this because it is not polite, they will not do that because
they are too proud. They say that once there was a baron in their
family. Who can tell how long ago! Perhaps when John the Baptist
was alive. What is that? Nothing. There is no baron now. All at once
somebody die a year ago, and leave them ten thousand do