; but
all young girls, even the most unsophisticated, have a strange fear,
possibly instinctive, of trusting to their natural protectors under the
like circumstances.

Genevieve had heard Pere Niseron take an oath to kill any man, no
matter who he was, who should dare to _touch_ (that was his word) his
granddaughter. The old man thought the child amply protected by the halo
of white hair and honor which a spotless life of three-score years and
ten had laid upon his brow. The vision of bloody scenes terrifies the
imagination of young girls so that they need not dive to the bottom of
their hearts for other numerous and inquisitive reasons which seal their
lips.

When La Pechina started with the milk which Madame Michaud had sent to
the daughter of Gaillard, the keeper of the gate of Conches, whose cow
had just calved, she looked about her cautiously, like a cat when it
ventures out onto the street. She saw no signs of Nicolas; she listened
to the silence, as the poet says, and hearing nothing, she concluded
that the rascal had gone to his day's work. The peasants were just
beginning to cut the rye; for they were in the habit of getting in their
own harvests first, so as to benefit by the best strength of the mowers.
But Nicolas was not a man to mind losing a day's work,--especially now
that he expected to leave the country after the fair at Soulanges and
begin, as the country people say, the new life of a soldier.

When La Pechina, with the jug on her head, was about half-way, Nicolas
slid like a wild-cat down the trunk of an elm, among the branches of
which he was hiding, and fell like a thunderbolt in front of the girl,
who flung away her pitcher and trusted to her fleet legs to regain the
pavilion. But a hundred feet farther on, Catherine Tonsard, who was on
the watch, rushed out of the wood and knocked so violently against the
flying girl that she was thrown down. The violence of the fall made her
unconscious. Catherine picked her up and carried her into the woods to
the middle of a tiny meadow where the Silver-spring brook bubbled up.

Catherine Tonsard was tall and strong, and in every respect the type of
woman whom painters and sculptors take, as the Republic did in former
days, for their figures of Liberty. She charmed the young men of the
valley of the Avonne with her voluminous bosom, her muscular legs, and
a waist as robust as it was flexible; with her plump arms, her eyes that
could flash and sparkle, and