the arm, helped her to rise, and
sustaining her with all his strength, for he felt that she was nearly
fainting, he led her out, after throwing five francs on one of the
chairs.

As soon as they were outside the gate, she began to sob and said, shaking
with grief:

"Oh! oh! is that what you have made of him?"

He was very pale and replied coldly:

"I did what I could. His farm is worth eighty thousand francs, and that
is more than most of the sons of the middle classes have."

They returned slowly, without speaking a word. She was still crying; the
tears ran down her cheeks continually for a time, but by degrees they
stopped, and they went back to Fecamp, where they found Monsieur de
Cadour waiting dinner for them. As soon as he saw them, he began to laugh
and exclaimed:

"So my wife has had a sunstroke, and I am very glad of it. I really think
she has lost her head for some time past!"

Neither of them replied, and when the husband asked them, rubbing his
hands:

"Well, I hope that, at least, you have had a pleasant walk?"

Monsieur d'Apreval replied:

"A delightful walk, I assure you; perfectly delightful."

THE MAISON TELLIER

They went there every evening about eleven o'clock, just as they would go
to the club. Six or eight of them; always the same set, not fast men, but
respectable tradesmen, and young men in government or some other employ,
and they would drink their Chartreuse, and laugh with the girls, or else
talk seriously with Madame Tellier, whom everybody respected, and then
they would go home at twelve o'clock! The younger men would sometimes
stay later.

It was a small, comfortable house painted yellow, at the corner of a
street behind Saint Etienne's Church, and from the windows one could see
the docks full of ships being unloaded, the big salt marsh, and, rising
beyond it, the Virgin's Hill with its old gray chapel.

Madame Tellier, who came of a respectable family of peasant proprietors
in the Department of the Eure, had taken up her profession, just as she
would have become a milliner or dressmaker. The prejudice which is so
violent and deeply rooted in large towns, does not exist in the country
places in Normandy. The peasant says:

"It is a paying-business," and he sends his daughter to keep an
establishment of this character just as he would send her to keep a
girls' school.

She had inherited the house from an old uncle, to whom it had belonged.
Monsieur and Madame Tel