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r to rise, and sustaining her with all his strength, for he felt that she was nearly fainting, he led her out, after throwing five francs on one of the chairs. As soon as they were outside the gate, she began to sob and said, shaking with grief: "Oh! oh! is that what you have made of him?" He was very pale and replied coldly: "I did what I could. His farm is worth eighty thousand francs, and that is more than most of the sons of the middle classes have." They returned slowly, without speaking a word. She was still crying; the tears ran down her cheeks continually for a time, but by degrees they stopped, and they went back to Fecamp, where they found Monsieur de Cadour waiting dinner for them. As soon as he saw them, he began to laugh and exclaimed: "So my wife has had a sunstroke, and I am very glad of it. I really think she has lost her head for some time past!" Neither of them replied, and when the husband asked them, rubbing his hands: "Well, I hope that, at least, you have had a pleasant walk?" Monsieur d'Apreval replied: "A delightful walk, I assure you; perfectly delightful." THE MAISON TELLIER I They went there every evening about eleven o'clock, just as they would go to the club. Six or eight of them; always the same set, not fast men, but respectable tradesmen, and young men in government or some other employ, and they would drink their Chartreuse, and laugh with the girls, or else talk seriously with Madame Tellier, whom everybody respected, and then they would go home at twelve o'clock! The younger men would sometimes stay later. It was a small, comfortable house painted yellow, at the corner of a street behind Saint Etienne's Church, and from the windows one could see the docks full of ships being unloaded, the big salt marsh, and, rising beyond it, the Virgin's Hill with its old gray chapel. Madame Tellier, who came of a respectable family of peasant proprietors in the Department of the Eure, had taken up her profession, just as she would have become a milliner or dressmaker. The prejudice which is so violent and deeply rooted in large towns, does not exist in the country places in Normandy. The peasant says: "It is a paying-business," and he sends his daughter to keep an establishment of this character just as he would send her to keep a girls' school. She had inherited the house from an old uncle, to whom it had belonged. Monsieur and Madame Tellier, who ha
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