The person who now entered was a girl of about eighteen, short, and very much deformed.  Though not exactly a hunchback, her spine was curved; her breast was sunken, and her head deeply set in the shoulders.  Her face was regular, but long, thin, very pale, and pitted with the small pox; yet it expressed great sweetness and melancholy.  Her blue eyes beamed with kindness and intelligence.  By a strange freak of nature, the handsomest woman would have been proud of the magnificent hair twisted in a coarse net at the back of her head.  She held an old basket in her hand.  Though miserably clad, the care and neatness of her dress revealed a powerful struggle with her poverty.  Notwithstanding the cold, she wore a scanty frock made of print of an indefinable color, spotted with white; but it had been so often washed, that its primitive design and color had long since disappeared.  In her resigned, yet suffering face, might be read a long familiarity with every form of suffering, every description of taunting.  From her birth, ridicule had ever pursued her.  We have said that she was very deformed, and she was vulgarly called “Mother Bunch.”  Indeed it was so usual to give her this grotesque name, which every moment reminded her of her infirmity, that Frances and Agricola, though they felt as much compassion as other people showed contempt for her, never called her, however, by any other name.

Mother Bunch, as we shall therefore call her in future, was born in the house in which Dagobert’s wife had resided for more than twenty years; and she had, as it were, been brought up with Agricola and Gabriel.

There are wretches fatally doomed to misery.  Mother Bunch had a very pretty sister, on whom Perrine Soliveau, their common mother, the widow of a ruined tradesman, had concentrated all her affection, while she treated her deformed child with contempt and unkindness.  The latter would often come, weeping, to Frances, on this account, who tried to console her, and in the long evenings amused her by teaching her to read and sew.  Accustomed to pity her by their mother’s example, instead of imitating other children, who always taunted and sometimes even beat her, Agricola and Gabriel liked her, and used to protect and defend her.

She was about fifteen, and her sister Cephyse was about seventeen, when their mother died, leaving them both in utter poverty.  Cephyse was intelligent, active, clever, but different to her sister; she had the lively, alert, hoydenish character which requires air, exercise and pleasures—­a good girl enough, but foolishly spoiled by her mother.  Cephyse, listening at first to Frances’s good advice, resigned herself to her lot; and, having learnt to sew, worked like her sister, for about a year.  But, unable to endure any longer the bitter privations her insignificant earnings, notwithstanding her incessant toil, exposed her to—­privations which often bordered on starvation—­Cephyse, young, pretty, of warm temperament, and surrounded by brilliant