Willan was right in one thing.  After the first mortification of returning to her father’s house, a widow, disgraced by being pensioned off from her old home, had worn away, Jeanne was happier than she had ever been in her life.  Her annuity, which was small for Mistress Willan Blaycke, was large for Jeanne, daughter of the landlord of the Golden Pear; and into that position she sank back at once,—­so contentedly, too, that her father was continually reproaching her with a great lack of spirit.  It was a sad come-down from his old air-castles for her and for himself,—­he still the landlord of a shabby little inn, and Jeanne, stout and middle-aged, sitting again behind the bar as she had done fifteen years before.  It was pretty hard.  So long as he knew that Jeanne was living in her fine house as Mistress Blaycke he had been content, in spite of Willan Blaycke’s having sternly forbidden him ever to show his face there.  But this last downfall was too much.  Victor Dubois ground his teeth and swore many oaths over it.  But no swearing could alter things; and after a while Victor himself began to take comfort in having Jeanne back again.  “And not a bit spoiled,” as he would say to his cronies, “by all the fine ways, to which she had never taken; thanks to God, Jeanne was as good a girl yet as ever.”—­“And as handsome too,” the politic cronies would add.

The Golden Pear was a much more attractive place since Jeanne had come back.  She was a good housekeeper, and she had learned much in Willan Blaycke’s house.  Moreover, she was a generous creature, and did not in the least mind spending a few dollars here and there to make things tidier and more comfortable.

A few weeks after Jeanne’s return to the inn there appeared in the family a new and by no means insignificant member.  This was the young Victorine Dubois, who was a daughter, they said, of Victor Dubois’s son Jean, the twin brother of Jeanne.  He had gone to Montreal many years ago, and had been moderately prosperous there as a wine-seller in a small way.  He had been dead now for two years, and his widow, being about to marry again, was anxious to get the young Victorine off her hands.  So the story ran, and on the surface it looked probable enough.  But Montreal was not a great way off from the parish of St. Urbans, in which stood Victor Dubois’s inn; there were men coming and going often who knew the city, and who looked puzzled when it was said in their hearing that Victorine was the eldest child of Jean Dubois the wine-seller.  She had been kept at a convent all these years, old Victor said, her father being determined that at least one of his children should be well educated.

Nobody could gainsay this, and Mademoiselle Victorine certainly had the air of having been much better trained and taught than most girls in her station.  But somehow, nobody quite knew why, the tale of her being Jean Dubois’s daughter was not believed.  Suspicions and at last rumors were afloat that she was an illegitimate child of Jeanne’s, born a few years before her marriage to Willan Blaycke.