a shade
of doubt. Living the same lives generation after generation, tilling the
same crops, and praying before the same stone altar in the small, quaint
church, it is not to be wondered at that when a change occurred to any
one of their number, it was regarded as a sort of social era. There
were those in St. Croix who had known Mere Giraud's grandfather, a
slow-spoken, kindly old peasant, who had drunk his _vin ordinaire_, and
smoked his pipe with the poorest; and there was not one who did not
well know Mere Giraud herself, and who had not watched the growth of the
little Laure, who had bloomed into a beauty not unlike the beauty of the
white Provence roses which climbed over and around her mother's cottage
door. "Mere Giraud's little daughter," she had been called, even after
she grew into the wonderfully tall and wonderfully fair creature she
became before she left the village, accompanying her brother Valentin to
Paris.

"_Ma foi!_" said the men, "but she is truly a beauty, Mere Giraud's
little daughter!"

"She should be well looked to," said the wiseacres,--"Mere Giraud's
little daughter."

"There is one we must always give way before," said the best-natured
among the girls, "and that one is Mere Giraud's little daughter."

The old _Cure_ the parish took interest in her, and gave her lessons,
and, as Mere Giraud would have held her strictly to them, even if she
had not been tractable and studious by nature, she was better educated
and more gently trained than her companions. The fact was, however, that
she had not many companions. Some element in her grace and beauty
seemed to separate her from the rest of her class. Village sports and
festivities had little attraction for her, and, upon the whole, she
seemed out of place among them. Her stature, her fair, still face, and
her slow, quiet movements, suggested rather embarrassingly to the humble
feasters the presence of some young princess far above them.

"_Pouf!_" said a sharp-tongued belle one day, "I have no patience with
her. She is so tall, this Laure, that one must be forever looking up to
her, and I, for one, do not care to be forever looking up."

The hint of refined pride in her demeanor was Mere Giraud's greatest
glory.

"She is not like the rest, my Laure," she would say to her son. "One can
see it in the way in which she holds her head'. She has the quiet, grave
air of a great personage."

There were many who wondered that Valentin showed no j