e whole night. "I shall never be able to go away from
here," she said, when Rosalie came into the room next morning.

"You'll have to, all the same, madame," answered the maid with rising
temper. "The lawyer is coming presently with the man who wants to buy
the chateau, and, if you don't sell it, you won't have a blade of grass
to call your own in four years' time."

"Oh, I cannot! I cannot!" moaned Jeanne.

But an hour afterwards came a letter from Paul asking for ten thousand
francs. What was to be done? Jeanne did not know, and, in her distress,
she consulted Rosalie, who shrugged her shoulders, and observed:

"What did I tell you, madame? Oh, you'd both of you have been in a nice
muddle if I hadn't come back."

Then, by her advice, Jeanne wrote back:

"My Dear Son: I cannot help you any more; you have ruined me, and I
am even obliged to sell Les Peuples. But I shall always have a home
for you whenever you choose to return to your poor old mother, who
has suffered so cruelly through you.

Jeanne."

The lawyer came with M. Jeoffrin, who was a retired sugar baker, and
Jeanne herself received them, and invited them to go all over the house
and grounds. Then a month after this visit, she signed the deed of sale,
and bought, at the same time, a little villa in the hamlet of
Batteville, standing on the Montivilliers high-road, near Goderville.

After she had signed the deeds she went out to the baroness's avenue,
and walked up and down, heart-broken and miserable while she bade
tearful, despairing farewells to the trees, the worm-eaten bench under
the plane tree, the wood, the old elm trunk, against which she had leant
so many times, and the hillock, where she had so often sat, and whence
she had watched the Comte de Fourville running towards the sea on the
awful day of Julien's death. She stayed out until the evening, and at
last Rosalie went to look for her and brought her in. A tall peasant of
about twenty-five was waiting at the door. He greeted Jeanne in a
friendly way, as if he had known her a long while:

"Good-day, Madame Jeanne, how are you? Mother told me I was to come and
help with the moving, and I wanted to know what you meant to take with
you, so that I could move it a little at a time without it hindering the
farm work."

He was Rosalie's son--Julien's son and Paul's brother. Jeanne's heart
almost stood still as she look