Nothing easier, everybody knew, than for Mistress Willan Blaycke to have supported half a dozen illegitimate children, if she had had them, on the money her husband gave her so lavishly; and there was old Victor, as ready and unscrupulous a go-between as ever an unscrupulous woman needed.  These rumors gained all the easier credence because Victorine bore so striking a resemblance to her “Aunt Jeanne.”  On the other hand, this ought not to have been taken as proof any more one way than the other; for there were plenty of people who recollected very well that in the days when little Jean and Jeanne toddled about together as children, nobody but their mother could tell them apart, except by their clothes.  So the winds of gossiping breaths blew both ways at once in the matter, and it was much discussed for a time.  But like all scandals, as soon as it became an old story nobody cared whether it were false or true; and before Victorine had been a year at the Golden Pear, the question of her relationship there was rarely raised.

One thing was certain, that no mother could have been fonder or more devoted to a child than Jeanne was to her niece; and everybody said so,—­some more civilly, some maliciously.  Her pride in the girl’s beauty was touching to see.  She seemed to have forgotten that she was ever a beauty herself; and she had no need to do this, for Jeanne was not yet forty, and many men found her piquant and pleasing still.  But all her vanity seemed now to be transferred to Victorine.  It was Victorine who was to have all the fine gowns and ornaments; Victorine who must go to the dances and fetes in costumes which were the wonder and the envy of all the girls in the region; Victorine who was to have everything made easy and comfortable for her in the house; and above all,—­and here the mother betrayed herself, for mother she was; the truth may as well be told early as late in our story,—­most of all, it was Victorine who was to be kept away from the bar, and to be spared all contact with the rough roysterers who frequented the Golden Pear.

Very ingenious were Jeanne’s excuses for these restrictions on her niece’s liberty.  Still more ingenious her explanations of the occasional exceptions she made now and then in favor of some well-to-do young farmer of the neighborhood, or some traveller in whom her alert maternal eye detected a possible suitor for Victorine’s hand.  Victorine herself was not so fastidious.  She was young, handsome, overflowing with vitality, and with no more conscience or delicacy than her mother had had before her.  If the whole truth had been known concerning the last four years of her life in the convent, it would have considerably astonished those good Catholics, if any such there be, who still believe that convents are sacred retreats filled with the chaste and the devout.  Victorine Dubois at the age of eighteen, when her grandfather took her home to his house, was as well versed a young woman in the ways and the wiles of love-making as