"What had grandfather done?" she cried. "Was he not thy husband's
father, too, being thine? How dared thy husband treat him so?"

Jeanne was silent for a few moments. A latent sense of justice to her
dead husband restrained her from assenting to Victorine's words.

"Nay," she said; "there are many things thou canst not understand. Thy
grandfather never complained. Willan Blaycke treated me most fairly
while he lived; and if it had not been for the boy, I would have had
thee in the stone house to-day, and had all my rights."

"Why did the boy hate thee?" asked Victorine. "What is he like?"

"As like to a magpie as one magpie is to another," said Jeanne,
bitterly; "with his fine French cloth of black, and his white ruffles,
and his long words in his mouth. Ah, but him I hate! It is to him we owe
it all."

"Dwells he now in the great house alone?" said Victorine.

"Ay, that he does,--alone with his books, of which he has about as many
as there are leaves on the trees; one could not so much as step or sit
for a book in one's way. I did hear that he has now with him another of
his own order, and that the two are riding all over the country,
marking out the lines anew of all the farms, and writing new bonds which
are so much harder on men than the old ones were. Bah! but he has the
soul of a miser in him, for all his handsome face!"

"Is he then so very handsome, Aunt Jeanne?" said Victorine, eagerly.