appearance with his sack.

"Well," said he, "will you take a sou now?"

"I knew I should see you again," the good woman quietly answered. "You'd
better take all I have left. There are seventeen bunches."

"That makes seventeen sous."

"No; thirty-four."

At last they agreed to fix the price at twenty-five sous. Madame
Francois was anxious to be off.

"He'd been keeping his eye upon me all the time," she said to Florent,
when Lacaille had gone off with the carrots in his sack. "That old rogue
runs things down all over the markets, and he often waits till the last
peal of the bell before spending four sous in purchase. Oh, these Paris
folk! They'll wrangle and argue for an hour to save half a sou, and then
go off and empty their purses at the wine shop."

Whenever Madame Francois talked of Paris she always spoke in a tone of
disdain, and referred to the city as though it were some ridiculous,
contemptible, far-away place, in which she only condescended to set foot
at nighttime.

"There!" she continued, sitting down again, beside Florent, on some
vegetables belonging to a neighbour, "I can get away now."

Florent bent his head. He had just committed a theft. When Lacaille