George Voss was very like his father, with this difference, as he was often told by the old folk about Granpere, that he would never fill his father’s shoes.  He was a smaller man, less tall by a couple of inches, less broad in proportion across the shoulders, whose arm would never be so strong, whose leg would never grace a tight stocking with so full a development.  But he had the same eye, bright and brown and very quick, the same mouth, the same aquiline nose, the same broad forehead and well-shaped chin, and the same look in his face which made men know as by instinct that he would sooner command than obey.  So there had come to be a few words, and George Voss had gone away to the house of a cousin of his mother’s, and had taken to commanding there.

Not that there had been any quarrel between the father and the son; nor indeed that George was aware that he had been in the least disobedient to his parent.  There was no recognised ambition for rule in the breasts of either of them.  It was simply this, that their tempers were alike; and when on an occasion Michel told his son that he would not allow a certain piece of folly which the son was, as he thought, likely to commit, George declared that he would soon set that matter right by leaving Granpere.  Accordingly he did leave Granpere, and became the right hand, and indeed the head, and backbone, and best leg of his old cousin Madame Faragon of the Poste at Colmar.  Now the matter on which these few words occurred was a question of love—­whether George Voss should fall in love with and marry his step-mother’s niece Marie Bromar.  But before anything farther can be said of these few words, Madame Voss and her niece must be introduced to the reader.

Madame Voss was nearly twenty years younger than her husband, and had now been a wife some five or six years.  She had been brought from Epinal, where she had lived with a married sister, a widow, much older than herself—­in parting from whom on her marriage there had been much tribulation.  ‘Should anything happen to Marie,’ she had said to Michel Voss, before she gave him her troth, ’you will let Minnie Bromar come to me?’ Michel Voss, who was then hotly in love with his hoped-for bride—­hotly in love in spite of his four-and-forty years—­gave the required promise.  The said ‘something’ which had been suspected had happened.  Madame Bromar had died, and Minnie Bromar her daughter—­or Marie as she was always afterwards called—­had at once been taken into the house at Granpere.  Michel never thought twice about it when he was reminded of his promise.  ‘If I hadn’t promised at all, she should come the same,’ he said.  ‘The house is big enough for a dozen more yet.’  In saying this he perhaps alluded to a little baby that then lay in a cradle in his wife’s room, by means of which at that time Madame Voss was able to make her big husband do pretty nearly anything that she pleased.  So Marie Bromar, then just fifteen years of age, was brought over from Epinal