I will tell you all
about it by and by with the rest."

Marianne evinced no loquacious curiosity; she quietly awaited his
confidences, and showed anxiety only respecting themselves and the
children.

"You received your salary, didn't you?" she asked.

"Yes, yes, you need not be afraid about that."

"Oh! I'm not afraid, it's only our little debts which worry me."

Then she asked again: "And did your business dinner go off all right?
I was afraid that Beauchene might detain you and make you miss your
train."

He replied that everything had gone off properly, but as he spoke he
flushed and felt a pang at his heart. To rid himself of his emotion he
affected sudden gayety.

"Well, and you, my dear," he asked, "how did you manage with your thirty
sous?"

"My thirty sous!" she gayly responded, "why, I was much too rich; we
fared like princes, all five of us, and I have six sous left."

Then, in her turn, she gave an account of her day, her daily life, pure
as crystal. She recapitulated what she had done, what she had said; she
related how the children had behaved, and she entered into the minutest
details respecting them and the house. With her, moreover, one day was
like another; each morning she set herself to live the same life afresh,
with never-failing happiness.

"To-day, though, we had a visit," said she; "Madame Lepailleur, the
woman from the mill over yonder, came to tell me that she had some fine
chickens for sale. As we owe her twelve francs for eggs and milk, I
believe that she simply called to see if I meant to pay her. I told her
that I would go to her place to-morrow."

While speaking Marianne had pointed through the gloom towards a big
black pile, a little way down the Yeuse. It was an old water-mill which
was still worked, and the Lepailleurs had now been installed in it for
three generations. The last of them, Francois Lepailleur, who considered
himself to be no fool, had come back from his military service with
little inclination to work, and an idea that the mill would never enrich
him, any more than it had enriched his father and grandfather. It then
occurred to him to marry a peasant farmer's daughter, Victoire Cornu,
whose dowry consisted of some neighboring fields skirting the Yeuse.
And the young couple then lived fairly at their ease, on the produce of
those fields and such small quantities of corn as the peasants of the
district still brought to be ground at the old mill. If the antiqua