t on the great floor, with rolls of bedding. Her
own oasis of homestead stood open, showing a small fireplace hollowed
in one wall, two feet above the floor; table and heavy chairs; and
sleeping rooms beyond. Yet none of these things were good enough to
offer such a stranger.

"Take no thought about me, good friend," said the girl, noticing
Mother Sandeau's anxiously creased face. "I shall presently go back to
my father."

"But, no," exclaimed the miller's wife, "the priest forbids women
below, and there is my son's bridal room upstairs with even a
dressing-table in it. I only held back on account of Angele La Vigne,"
she added to comprehending neighbors, "but Angele will attend to the
lady there."

"Angele will gladly attend to the lady anywhere," spoke out Angele's
mother, with a resentment of her child's position which ruin could not
crush. "It is the same as if marriage was never talked of between your
son Laurent and her."

"Yes, neighbor, yes," said the miller's wife appeasingly. It was not
her fault that a pig had stopped the marriage. She gave her own
candle to Angele, with a motherly look. The girl had a pink and golden
prettiness unusual among habitantes. Though all flush was gone out of
her skin under the stress of the hour, she retained the innocent clear
pallor of an infant. Angele hurried to straighten her disordered dress
before taking the candle, and then led Madame De Mattissart up the
next flight of stairs.

The mill's noise had forced talkers to lift their voices, and it now
half dulled the clamp of habitante shoes below, and the whining of
children longing again for sleep. Huge square wooden hoppers were
shaking down grain, and the two or three square sashes in the
thickness of front wall let in some light from the burning cote.

The building's mighty stone hollows were as cool as the dew-pearled
and river-vapored landscape outside. Occasional shots from below kept
reverberating upward through two more floors overhead.

Laurent's bridal apartment was of new boards built like a deck cabin
at one side of the third story. It was hard for Angele to throw open
the door of this sacred little place which she had expected to
enter as a bride, and the French officer's young wife understood it,
restraining the girl's hand.

"Stop, my child. Let us not go in. I came up here simply to quiet the
others."

"But you were to rest in this chamber, madame."

"Do you think I can rest when I do not know wh