a great sympathy with, and tenderness for,
the poor little terrified, hunted girl, lying there at her
mercy.

Such tenderness, and power of sympathy with distress, were
indeed amongst Jeanne-Marie's strongest characteristics,
hidden though they were under a harsh, imperious manner and
exterior. For she too had had a strange, sad, troublous life,
with tragedy and sorrow enough in it, which it does not
concern us to relate here, and which were yet of no small
concern to our little Madelon, as she lay there, dependent on
this one woman for freedom, shelter, and even existence. For
if, as is surely the case, in our life of to-day lies a whole
prophecy of our life in the future, if in our most trivial
actions is hidden the germ of our greatest deeds, then our
most momentous decision in some sudden emergency, is but the
sure consummation and fruition of each unnoticed detail, our
action of to-day but the inevitable result of a whole precious
lifetime of preparation for some unforeseen crisis. So, too,
from a present habit of thought, much may be surmised as to
what has been done and suffered in the past; and though little
was known about Jeanne-Marie, some inferences might have been
drawn concerning her former life, had any of her neighbours
been skilled in the inductive method, or been sufficiently
interested in the woman to study her character closely. But in
fact they cared very little about her. It is true that when
she had first come into the village, there had been many
conjectures about her set afloat. She did not belong to that
part of the country, she could not even speak the Liege
_patois_, and never took the trouble to learn it, invariably
using the French language. She had no belongings, and never
spoke of her former life; so that it was not long before a
vague, open-mouthed curiosity, seizing upon a thousand
untested hints and rumours to satisfy itself withal, led the
villagers to whisper among themselves that some strange
history was attached to her; and woe to that woman who, in a
small village, is accredited with a strange history that no
one knows anything about! But Jeanne-Marie had outlived all
this; her secrets, if she had any, were never revealed either
then or later, and in time people had ceased to trouble
themselves about her. She led a silent, solitary life,
resenting perhaps the suspicion with which she had at first
been received, and holding aloof from her neighbours as they
held aloof from h