r to rise,
and sustaining her with all his strength, for he felt that she was
nearly fainting, he led her out, after throwing five francs on one of
the chairs.

As soon as they were outside the gate, she began to sob and said,
shaking with grief:

"Oh! oh! is that what you have made of him?"

He was very pale and replied coldly:

"I did what I could. His farm is worth eighty thousand francs, and that
is more than most of the sons of the middle classes have."

They returned slowly, without speaking a word. She was still crying; the
tears ran down her cheeks continually for a time, but by degrees they
stopped, and they went back to Fecamp, where they found Monsieur de
Cadour waiting dinner for them. As soon as he saw them, he began to
laugh and exclaimed:

"So my wife has had a sunstroke, and I am very glad of it. I really
think she has lost her head for some time past!"

Neither of them replied, and when the husband asked them, rubbing his
hands:

"Well, I hope that, at least, you have had a pleasant walk?"

Monsieur d'Apreval replied:

"A delightful walk, I assure you; perfectly delightful."

THE MAISON TELLIER

I

They went there every evening about eleven o'clock, just as they would
go to the club. Six or eight of them; always the same set, not fast men,
but respectable tradesmen, and young men in government or some other
employ, and they would drink their Chartreuse, and laugh with the girls,
or else talk seriously with Madame Tellier, whom everybody respected,
and then they would go home at twelve o'clock! The younger men would
sometimes stay later.

It was a small, comfortable house painted yellow, at the corner of a
street behind Saint Etienne's Church, and from the windows one could see
the docks full of ships being unloaded, the big salt marsh, and, rising
beyond it, the Virgin's Hill with its old gray chapel.

Madame Tellier, who came of a respectable family of peasant proprietors
in the Department of the Eure, had taken up her profession, just as she
would have become a milliner or dressmaker. The prejudice which is so
violent and deeply rooted in large towns, does not exist in the country
places in Normandy. The peasant says:

"It is a paying-business," and he sends his daughter to keep an
establishment of this character just as he would send her to keep a
girls' school.

She had inherited the house from an old uncle, to whom it had belonged.
Monsieur and Madame Tellier, who ha