-in-law, and that she was a disgrace to the community, and ought
to be publicly reprimanded.

Isaac Gardon, long reported to have been martyred--some said at
Paris, others averred at La Sablerie--had indeed been welcomed with
enthusiastic joy and veneration, when he made his appearance at
Montauban, pale, aged, bent, leaning on a staff, and showing the dire
effect of the rheumatic fever which had prostrated him after the night
of drenching and exposure during the escape from La Sablerie. Crowded as
the city was, there was a perfect competition among the tradesfolk for
the honour of entertaining him and the young widow and child of a St.
Bartholomew martyr. A cordwainer of the street of the Soubirous Hauts
obtained this honour, and the wife, though speaking only the sweet
Provencal tongue, soon established the most friendly relations with M.
Gardon's daughter-in-law.

Two or three more pastors likewise lodged in the same house, and ready
aid was given by Mademoiselle Gardon, as all called Eustacie, in
the domestic cares thus entailed, while her filial attention to her
father-in-law and her sweet tenderness to her child struck all this home
circle with admiration. Children of that age were seldom seen at home
among the better classes in towns. Then, as now, they were universally
consigned to country nurses, who only brought them home at three or four
years old, fresh from a squalid, neglected cottage life: and Eustacie's
little moonbeam, _la petite Rayonette_, as she loved to call her, was
quite an unusual spectacle; and from having lived entirely with grown
people, and enjoyed the most tender and dainty care, she was intelligent
and brightly docile to a degree that appeared marvellous to those who
only saw children stupefied by a contrary system. She was a lovely
little thing, exquisitely fair, and her plump white limbs small but
perfectly moulded; she was always happy, because always healthy, and
living in an atmosphere of love; and she was the pet and wonder of all
the household, from the grinning apprentice to the grave young candidate
who hoped to be elected pastor to the Duke de Quinet's village in the
Cevennes.

And yet it was _la petite Rayonette_ who first brought her mother into
trouble. Since her emancipation from swaddling clothes she had been
equipped in a little gray woolen frock, such as Eustacie had learnt to
knit among the peasants, and varied with broad while stripes which gave
it something of the moo