with their eagerness to make a big fortune I’m much afraid that those worthy folks will do something very foolish.  Oh!  I was forgetting.  I called on the landlord, and though I had a good deal of difficulty over it, he ended by consenting to have the roof entirely relaid.  Ah! what a home, too, those Seguins have!  I came away feeling quite scared.  But 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 antiquated and badly repaired mechanism of the mill had been replaced by modern appliances, and if the land, instead