-gesticulating and talking in her high, shrill, unmodulated voice. Fanchor, by right of her basket, kept close beside her; last of all marched Veuve Angelin, half-curious and half-contemptuous.

There is no news like one's own news.

CHAPTER II.

"A square-set man and honest."

-The Holy Grail.

KNOTS of people stood about the streets, all talking of the strange event. Charville is rich in beauty, in picturesqueness, in its magnificent Cathedral, but its events are few and orderly. People do get killed every now and then, it is true; indeed, only a few months before, young Jean Gouje had fallen from a scaffolding, and never spoken again. But then everybody knew Jean Gouÿe, and all about him; so that there was no mystery or room for speculation in his fate, poor fellow ! This last was a very dif ferent matter. Who were the strangers? Where did they come from? Where were they going? What imaginable circumstance brought them to Charville? What made him fall? Was he dead? Was he alive? Was mademoiselle in much grief? Each person asked the other without much hope of finding out; so that it was absolutely delightful to get hold of Nannon, and to hear the little she had to

:

tell. There was no hurry of business or whirl of events to interfere with their curiosity. Charville took life very leisurely if a house had to be built the masons talked, laughed, and joked with each other between laying on their stones, the shoemakers gossiped with their neighbours, women brought their work to the door, played with the children, scolded or chattered. It was an easy, quiet, lounging sort of existence, without much distraction from the outer world-a magnified village life. Such an accident as had occurred that morning, came upon them with something of the freshness of a new sensation. Nannon had never been made so much of. Angelin followed sulkily.

Veuve

M.

She would not accompany the triumphal progress to the door of the Cygne, but turned down a narrow ill-paved street, which branched off by the Evêché, and ended in a small modern square. Deshouliéres' house stood in the midst of it, and she entered hastily, with some fears lest he should be there, and angry at the unusual delay of his breakfast. He was an easy-going master, just the one that Veuve Angelin liked, since he was too entirely absorbed with his own thoughts and interests to interfere much with her sovereignty, but it was also true, that every now and then he awoke sufficiently to make her aware, that she

could not presume absolutely upon his absent ways. Even when she ruled most despotically she was just a little afraid of him. There was always a possibility that he might assert the unreasonable male prerogative of having his own way. Now, she was conscious that he would have a just cause for indignation, if he returned, hungry and weary, from his morning's work, to find the house empty, and no food prepared. "It is all the fault of that gossiping old Nannon!" she said crossly to herself, as she stopped, hot and out of breath, to listen at the foot of the stairs, for her master's hasty steps overhead. She heard nothing; but it was with the air of a martyr that she mounted, prepared, if there were need, to expatiate upon the extent of her own sufferings, and the inconveniences caused by the absence of Lisette, the fille who generally fetched the water. She need not, however, have been afraid. It was quite two hours afterwards. the things had long been set out in the little salon, with its polished floor, its red curtains, its mirror, its time-piece; in the kitchen, where Veuve Angelin also slept, little pots and pans were simmering and bubbling over tiny hollows filled with charcoal, scooped out of the brick arched stove-before the doctor and little Roulleau, the notary, came round

the corner with excited faces, eagerly talking as they walked.

"Man's folly is never so apparent as in his last moments," the doctor was saying cynically, as they turned in from the square, and began to mount the bare uncarpeted staircase.

Veuve Angelin standing at the top, caught the words with a certain grim satisfaction.

"So he is dead, after all, in spite of that old woman's obstinacy," she said volubly. "I knew it was so from the very first; what one sees-one sees, and what one hears-one hears, and nobody can make it different, try as they will. But as for those creatures, bah! They are imbécilles, know-nothings; one might as well waste one's breath upon a stone wall, Monsieur has no doubt just come from the Cygne?"

"Hold your tongue, Marie," answered the doctor shortly; "get us something to eat, and do not employ yourself in killing my patients beforehand."

"Something has vexed him," reflected Marie, vanishing promptly. "Do what one will for their comfort, those men are always ungrateful."

She would willingly have made up for his want of communicativeness by listening to the conversation as the two drank vin ordinaire, and munched radishes, but M. Deshouliéres was exasperatingly