u the first day we have arrived."

The good old priest was overwhelmed by the news, but his joy almost
brought tears to his eyes when the ladies each presented him with a
thousand francs, and promised five hundred francs a month for the poor.
He had never handled so much money in all his life before.

"Why, there will be no poor left in all the district!" he stammered.

"And we should be glad if that were so," said Madame Scott, "for we have
plenty, and we could not do better with it."

Then followed the happiest little dinner party that had ever taken place
beneath the abbe's roof. Madame Scott explained how her husband had
bought the chateau as a surprise for her, and that neither she nor her
sister had seen it until that morning.

"Now, tell me," she suggested, "what they said about the new owner." The
old priest blushed, and was at a loss to answer. "Well, you are a
soldier," she continued, turning to Lieutenant Reynaud, "and you will
tell me. Did they say that I had been a beggar?"

"Yes, I heard that said."

"And that I had been a performer in a travelling circus?"

"That also I heard said," he admitted.

"I thank you for your frankness; and now let me tell you that, while I
can see nothing in either case that would be any disgrace to me, the
story does not happen to be true. I have known what it is to be poor,
for my parents died eight years ago, leaving us only a great lawsuit,
but my father's last wish was that we should fight it to the end. With
the aid of the son of one of his old friends, now my husband, we fought
and won. That is how I came into my fortune. The stories you have heard
were invented by spiteful Paris journalists."

After the ladies had taken their departure for Paris, the Abbe
Constantin was as happy as he had so lately been miserable. And as for
Lieutenant Reynaud, the vision of their fresh and charming faces was
with him all through the military manoeuvres in which he was now
engaged. But as both of them were equally charming in his mind, he
concluded he could not have fallen in love, or he would have known which
he admired the more.

He did not know how many were the suitors in Paris for Miss Bettina, and
possibly if he had seen the sisters among the fashionable people of that
gay city he would never have given them a second thought, for he was a
true son of the country, this healthy and manly young officer, whose
tastes were as simple as the surroundings in which he had grown