Both the father and the daughter were of the sort that would normally have avoided all observation; that is, all observation in that extraordinary modern world which calls out everything except strength.  Both of them had strength below the surface; they were like quiet peasants owning enormous and unquarried mines.  The father with his square face and grey side whiskers, the daughter with her square face and golden fringe of hair, were both stronger than they know; stronger than anyone knew.  The father believed in civilization, in the storied tower we have erected to affront nature; that is, the father believed in Man.  The daughter believed in God; and was even stronger.  They neither of them believed in themselves; for that is a decadent weakness.

The daughter was called a devotee.  She left upon ordinary people the impression—­the somewhat irritating impression—­produced by such a person; it can only be described as the sense of strong water being perpetually poured into some abyss.  She did her housework easily; she achieved her social relations sweetly; she was never neglectful and never unkind.  This accounted for all that was soft in her, but not for all that was hard.  She trod firmly as if going somewhere; she flung her face back as if defying something; she hardly spoke a cross word, yet there was often battle in her eyes.  The modern man asked doubtfully where all this silent energy went to.  He would have stared still more doubtfully if he had been told that it all went into her prayers.

The conventions of the Isle of St. Loup were necessarily a compromise or confusion between those of France and England; and it was vaguely possible for a respectable young lady to have half-attached lovers, in a way that would be impossible to the bourgeoisie of France.  One man in particular had made himself an unmistakable figure in the track of this girl as she went to church.  He was a short, prosperous-looking man, whose long, bushy black beard and clumsy black umbrella made him seem both shorter and older than he really was; but whose big, bold eyes, and step that spurned the ground, gave him an instant character of youth.

His name was Camille Bert, and he was a commercial traveller who had only been in the island an idle week before he began to hover in the tracks of Madeleine Durand.  Since everyone knows everyone in so small a place, Madeleine certainly knew him to speak to; but it is not very evident that she ever spoke.  He haunted her, however; especially at church, which was, indeed, one of the few certain places for finding her.  In her home she had a habit of being invisible, sometimes through insatiable domesticity, sometimes through an equally insatiable solitude.  M. Bert did not give the impression of a pious man, though he did give, especially with his eyes, the impression of an honest one.  But he went to Mass with a simple exactitude that could not be mistaken for a pose, or even for a vulgar fascination.  It was perhaps this religious regularity which eventually drew Madeleine into recognition of him.  At least it is certain that she twice spoke to him with her square and open smile in the porch of the church; and there was human nature enough in the hamlet to turn even that into gossip.