n. She could not sleep at
night; she thought of it the whole day long, and in the evening, when
her work was done, she used to sit in front of the fire and look at it
intently, like people do whose thoughts are far away.

They began to talk about her, and to tease her about her lover. They
asked her whether he was tall, handsome and rich. When was the wedding
to be, and the christening? And often she ran away, to cry by herself,
for these questions seemed to hurt her, like the prick of a pin, and in
order to forget their jokes, she began to work still more energetically,
and still thinking of her child, she sought for the means of saving up
money for it, and determined to work so that her master would be obliged
to raise her wages.

Then, by degrees, she almost monopolized the work, and persuaded him to
get rid of one servant girl, who had become useless since she had taken
to working like two; she economized in the bread, oil and candles, in
the corn, which they gave to the fowls too extravagantly, and in the
fodder for the horses and cattle, which was rather wasted. She was as
miserly about her master's money, as if it had been her own, and by dint
of making good bargains, of getting high prices for all their produce,
and by baffling the peasants' tricks when they offered anything for
sale, he at last entrusted her with buying and selling everything, with
the direction of all the laborers, and with the quantity of provisions
necessary for the household, so that in a short time she became
indispensable to him. She kept such a strict eye on everything about
her, that under her direction the farm prospered wonderfully, and for
five miles round people talked of "Master Vallin's servant," and the
farmer himself said everywhere: "That girl is worth more than her weight
in gold."

But time passed by, and her wages remained the same. Her hard work was
accepted as something that was due from every good servant, and as a
mere token of her good-will; and she began to think rather bitterly,
that if the farmer could put fifty or a hundred crowns extra into the
bank every month, thanks to her, she was still only earning her two
hundred francs a year, neither more nor less, and so she made up her
mind to ask for an increase of wages. She went to see the schoolmaster
three times about it, but when she got there, she spoke about something
else. She felt a kind of modesty in asking for money, as if it was
something disgraceful; but