vial and
all powerful tyrant.

Other friends were about to come on a visit, religious people with
Legitimist opinions. The master and mistress of the chateau considered
it would be impossible to let them meet their lively guest, and, not
knowing what to do, announced to Joseph Mouradour one evening that
they were obliged to go away from home for a few days about a little
matter of business, and they begged of him to remain in the house
alone.

He showed no trace of emotion, and replied:

"Very well; 'tis all the same to me; I'll wait here for you as long as
you like. What I say is this--there need be no ceremony between
friends. You're quite right to look after your own affairs--why the
devil shouldn't you? I'll not take offense at your doing that, quite
the contrary. It only makes me feel quite at my ease with you. Go, my
friends--I'll wait for you."

M. and Madame Meroul started next morning.

He is waiting for them.

THE ORPHAN

Mademoiselle Source had adopted this boy under very sad circumstances.
She was at the time thirty-six years old. She was deformed, having in
her infancy slipped off her nurse's lap into the fireplace, and
getting her face so shockingly burned that it ever afterwards
presented a frightful appearance. This deformity had made her resolve
not to marry, for she did not want any man to marry her for her money.

A female neighbor of hers, being left a widow during her pregnancy,
died in child-birth, without leaving a sou. Mademoiselle Source took
the new-born child, put him out to nurse, reared him, sent him to a
boarding-school, then brought him home in his fourteenth year, in
order to have in her empty house somebody who would love her, who
would look after her, who would make her old age pleasant.

She resided on a little property four leagues away from Rennes, and
she now dispensed with a servant. The expenses having increased to
more than double what they had been since this orphan's arrival, her
income of three thousand francs was no longer sufficient to support
three persons.

She attended to the housekeeping and the cooking herself, and she sent
out the boy on errands, letting him further occupy himself with
cultivating the garden. He was gentle, timid, silent, and caressing.
And she experienced a deep joy, a fresh joy at being embraced by him,
without any apparent surprise or repugnance being exhibited by him on
account of her ugliness. He called her "Aunt" and treated