“Gracious, what chemises! coarse enough to scratch her skin off; not a thing can she use here,” said Adele, emptying the bundle.

Master, mistress, and servant were busy till past ten o’clock, deciding what cambric they should buy for the new chemises, how many pairs of stockings, how many under-petticoats, and what material, and in reckoning up the whole cost of Pierrette’s outfit.

“You won’t get off under three hundred francs,” said Rogron, who could remember the different prices, and add them up from his former shop-keeping habit.

“Three hundred francs!” cried Sylvie.

“Yes, three hundred.  Add it up.”

The brother and sister went over the calculation once more, and found the cost would be fully three hundred francs, not counting the making.

“Three hundred francs at one stroke!” said Sylvie to herself as she got into bed.

* * * * *

Pierrette was one of those children of love whom love endows with its tenderness, its vivacity, its gaiety, its nobility, its devotion.  Nothing had so far disturbed or wounded a heart that was delicate as that of a fawn, but which was now painfully repressed by the cold greeting of her cousins.  If Brittany had been full of outward misery, at least it was full of love.  The old Lorrains were the most incapable of merchants, but they were also the most loving, frank, caressing, of friends, like all who are incautious and free from calculation.  Their little granddaughter had received no other education at Pen-Hoel than that of nature.  Pierrette went where she liked, in a boat on the pond, or roaming the village and the fields with Jacques Brigaut, her comrade, exactly as Paul and Virginia might have done.  Petted by everybody, free as air, they gaily chased the joys of childhood.  In summer they ran to watch the fishing, they caught the many-colored insects, they gathered flowers, they gardened; in winter they made slides, they built snow-men or huts, or pelted each other with snowballs.  Welcomed by all, they met with smiles wherever they went.

When the time came to begin their education, disasters came, too.  Jacques, left without means at the death of his father, was apprenticed by his relatives to a cabinet-maker, and fed by charity, as Pierrette was soon to be at Saint-Jacques.  Until the little girl was taken with her grandparents to that asylum, she had known nothing but fond caresses and protection from every one.  Accustomed to confide in so much love, the little darling missed in these rich relatives, so eagerly desired, the kindly looks and ways which all the world, even strangers and the conductors of the coaches, had bestowed upon her.  Her bewilderment, already great, was increased by the moral atmosphere she had entered.  The heart turns suddenly cold or hot like the body.  The poor child wanted to cry, without knowing why; but being very tired she went to sleep.