The driver of the diligence stated that he had set down the murdered woman on the road between half-past nine and ten o’clock.

The accused was acquitted.  A will, drawn up a long time before, which had been left in the hands of a notary in Rennes, made him sole heir.  So he inherited everything.

For a long time, the people of the country boycotted him, as they still suspected him.  His house, that of the dead woman, was looked upon as accursed.  People avoided him in the street.

But he showed himself so good-natured, so open, so familiar, that gradually these horrible doubts were forgotten.  He was generous, obliging, ready to talk to the humblest about anything, as long as they cared to talk to him.

The notary, Maitre Rameau, was one of the first to take his part, attracted by his smiling loquacity.  He said at a dinner, at the tax collector’s house: 

“A man who speaks with such facility and who is always in good humor could not have such a crime on his conscience.”

Touched by his argument, the others who were present reflected, and they recalled to mind the long conversations with this man who would almost compel them to stop at the road corners to listen to his ideas, who insisted on their going into his house when they were passing by his garden, who could crack a joke better than the lieutenant of the gendarmes himself, and who possessed such contagious gaiety that, in spite of the repugnance with which he inspired them, they could not keep from always laughing in his company.

All doors were opened to him after a time.

He is to-day the mayor of his township.

THE BEGGAR

He had seen better days, despite his present misery and infirmities.

At the age of fifteen both his legs had been crushed by a carriage on the Varville highway.  From that time forth he begged, dragging himself along the roads and through the farmyards, supported by crutches which forced his shoulders up to his ears.  His head looked as if it were squeezed in between two mountains.

A foundling, picked up out of a ditch by the priest of Les Billettes on the eve of All Saints’ Day and baptized, for that reason, Nicholas Toussaint, reared by charity, utterly without education, crippled in consequence of having drunk several glasses of brandy given him by the baker (such a funny story!) and a vagabond all his life afterward—­the only thing he knew how to do was to hold out his hand for alms.

At one time the Baroness d’Avary allowed him to sleep in a kind of recess spread with straw, close to the poultry yard in the farm adjoining the chateau, and if he was in great need he was sure of getting a glass of cider and a crust of bread in the kitchen.  Moreover, the old lady often threw him a few pennies from her window.  But she was dead now.