It was an odd thing that it never occurred to Jeanne how near the sill of Victorine’s south window was to the stout railing of the last broad platform of the outside staircase.  This railing had been built up high, and was partly roofed over, making a pretty place for pots of flowers in summer; and Victorine never looked so well anywhere as she did leaning out of her window and watering the flowers which stood there.  Many a flirtation went on between this casement window and the courtyard below, where all the travellers were in the habit of standing and talking with the ostlers, and with old Victor himself, who was not the landlord to leave his ostlers to do as they liked with horses and grain,—­many a flirtation, but none that meant or did any harm; for with all her wildness and love of frolic, Mademoiselle Victorine never lost her head.  Deep down in her heart she had an ambition which she never confessed even to her aunt Jeanne.  She had read enough romances to believe that it was by no means an impossible thing that a landlord’s daughter should marry a gentleman; and to marry a gentleman, if she married at all, Victorine was fully resolved.  She never tired of questioning her aunt about the details of her life in Willan Blaycke’s house; and she sometimes gazed for hours at the gilt-panelled coach, which on all fine days stood in the courtyard of the Golden Pear, the wonder of all rustics.  On the rare occasions when her aunt went abroad in this fine vehicle, Victorine sat by her side in an ecstasy of pride and delight.  It seemed to her that to be the owner of such a coach as that, to live in a fine house, and have a fine gentleman for one’s husband must be the very climax of bliss.  She wondered much at her aunt’s contentment in her present estate.

“How canst thou bear it, Aunt Jeanne?” she said sometimes.  “How canst thou bear to live as we live here,—­to be in the bar-room with the men, and to sit always in the smoke, after the fine rooms and the company thou hadst for so long?”

“Bah!” Jeanne would reply.  “It’s little thou knowest of that fine company.  I had like to die of weariness more often than I was gay in it; and as for fine rooms, I care nothing for them.”

“But thy husband, Aunt Jeanne,” Victorine once ventured to say,—­“surely thou wert not weary when he was with thee?”

Jeanne’s face darkened.  “Keep a civiller tongue in thy head,” she replied, “than to be talking to widows of the husbands they have buried.  He was a good man, Willan Blaycke,—­a good man; but I liked him not overmuch, though we lived not in quarrelling.  He went his ways, as men go, and I let him be.”

Victorine’s curiosity was by no means satisfied.  She asked endless questions of all whom she met who could tell her anything about her aunt’s husband.  Very much she regretted that she had not been taken from the convent before this strange, free-hearted, rollicking gentleman had died.  She would have managed affairs better, she thought, than Aunt Jeanne had done.  Romantic visions of herself as his favorite flitted through her brain.