sweeter or fairer nook of Paradise.

The year rolled on, and the cottage under the sycamores was but the
happier for its new inmate. Bernadou was serious of temper, though so
gentle, and the arch, gay humour of his young wife was like perpetual
sunlight in the house. Margot, too, was so docile, so eager, so bright,
and so imbued with devotional reverence for her husband and his home,
that Reine Allix day by day blessed the fate that had brought to her
this fatherless and penniless child. Bernadou himself spoke little;
words were not in his way; but his blue, frank eyes shone with an
unclouded radiance that never changed, and his voice, when he did speak,
had a mellow softness in it that made his slightest speech to the two
women with him tender as a caress.

"Thou art a happy woman, my sister," said the priest, who was well-nigh
as old as herself.

Reine Allix bowed her head and made the sign of the cross. "I am, praise
be to God!"

And being happy, she went to the hovel of poor Madelon Dreux, the
cobbler's widow, and nursed her and her children through a malignant
fever, sitting early and late, and leaving her own peaceful hearth for
the desolate hut with the delirious ravings and heartrending moans of
the fever-stricken. "How ought one to dare to be happy if one is not
of use?" she would say to those who sought to dissuade her from running
such peril.

Madelon Dreux and her family recovered, owing to her their lives; and
she was happier than before, thinking of them when she sat on the settle