that their time would
come, they had patience.

The housekeeper, giving them a severe look, proceeded to her own snug
apartment, followed by the crone, whom she seated in her easiest chair
and proceeded to refresh with a glass of cognac, which was swallowed
with much relish and wiping of lips, accompanied by a little artificial
cough. Dame Tremblay kept a carafe of it in her room to raise the
temperature of her low spirits and vapors to summer heat, not that she
drank, far from it, but she liked to sip a little for her stomach's
sake.

"It is only a thimbleful I take now and then," she said. "When I was
the Charming Josephine I used to kiss the cups I presented to the young
gallants, and I took no more than a fly! but they always drank bumpers
from the cup I kissed!" The old dame looked grave as she shook her head
and remarked, "But we cannot be always young and handsome, can we, Mere
Malheur?"

"No, dame, but we can be jolly and fat, and that is what we are! You
don't quaff life by thimblefuls, and you only want a stout offer to show
the world that you can trip as briskly to church yet as any girl in New
France!"

The humor of the old crone convulsed Dame Tremblay with laughter, as if
some invisible fingers were tickling her wildly under the armpits.

She composed herself at last, and drawing her chair close to that of
Mere Malheur, looked her inquiringly in the face and asked, "What is the
news?"

Dame Tremblay was endowed with more than the ordinary curiosity of her
sex. She knew more news of city and country than any one else, and
she dispensed it as freely as she gathered. She never let her stock of
gossip run low, and never allowed man or woman to come to speak with
her without pumping them dry of all they knew. A secret in anybody's
possession set her wild to possess it, and she gave no rest to her
inordinate curiosity until she had fished it out of even the muddiest
waters.

The mystery that hung around Caroline was a source of perpetual
irritation to the nerves of Dame Tremblay. She had tried as far as she
dared by hint and suggestion to draw from the lady some reference to
her name and family, but in vain. Caroline would avow nothing, and Dame
Tremblay, completely baffled by a failure of ordinary means to find out
the secret, bethought herself of her old resource in case of perplexity,
Mere Malheur.

For several days she had been brooding over this mode of satisfying
her curiosity, when the unexpec