The good old priest was overwhelmed by the news, but his joy almost brought tears to his eyes when the ladies each presented him with a thousand francs, and promised five hundred francs a month for the poor.  He had never handled so much money in all his life before.

“Why, there will be no poor left in all the district!” he stammered.

“And we should be glad if that were so,” said Madame Scott, “for we have plenty, and we could not do better with it.”

Then followed the happiest little dinner party that had ever taken place beneath the abbe’s roof.  Madame Scott explained how her husband had bought the chateau as a surprise for her, and that neither she nor her sister had seen it until that morning.

“Now, tell me,” she suggested, “what they said about the new owner.”  The old priest blushed, and was at a loss to answer.  “Well, you are a soldier,” she continued, turning to Lieutenant Reynaud, “and you will tell me.  Did they say that I had been a beggar?”

“Yes, I heard that said.”

“And that I had been a performer in a travelling circus?”

“That also I heard said,” he admitted.

“I thank you for your frankness; and now let me tell you that, while I can see nothing in either case that would be any disgrace to me, the story does not happen to be true.  I have known what it is to be poor, for my parents died eight years ago, leaving us only a great lawsuit, but my father’s last wish was that we should fight it to the end.  With the aid of the son of one of his old friends, now my husband, we fought and won.  That is how I came into my fortune.  The stories you have heard were invented by spiteful Paris journalists.”

After the ladies had taken their departure for Paris, the Abbe Constantin was as happy as he had so lately been miserable.  And as for Lieutenant Reynaud, the vision of their fresh and charming faces was with him all through the military manoeuvres in which he was now engaged.  But as both of them were equally charming in his mind, he concluded he could not have fallen in love, or he would have known which he admired the more.

He did not know how many were the suitors in Paris for Miss Bettina, and possibly if he had seen the sisters among the fashionable people of that gay city he would never have given them a second thought, for he was a true son of the country, this healthy and manly young officer, whose tastes were as simple as the surroundings in which he had grown up demanded.

Miss Bettina, indeed, had only to say the word, and she might have been the Princess Romanelli.  “And I should like to be a princess, for the name sounds well,” she said to herself.  “Oh, if I only loved him!” There were many men of rank and title who would have been glad to have married the wealthy young American lady, but she found herself in love with none of them, and now she was looking forward to the fourteenth of June, when she and her sister were to leave Paris for Longueval.  During their stay at the castle they were to entertain many friends, but for ten days they were to be free to roam the woods and fields, and forget the distractions of their fashionable life in the capital.