chair, was more than usually inclined to gossip.

Damase Evanturel's mind was stirred concerning the loss of the iron
cross; the threat made by Filion Lacasse and his companions troubled him.
The one person beside the Cure, Jo Portugais, and Louis Trudel, to whom
M'sieu' talked much, was the postmaster, who sometimes met him of an
evening as he was taking the air. More than once he had walked behind
the wheel-chair and pushed it some distance, making the little crippled
man gossip of village matters.

As the two sat at supper the postmaster was inclined to take a serious
view of M'sieu's position. He railed at Filion Lacasse; he called the
suspicious habitants clodhoppers, who didn't know any better--which was
a tribute to his own superior birth; and at last, carried away by a
feverish curiosity, he suggested that Rosalie should go and look through
the cracks in the shutters of the tailor-shop and find out what was going
on within. This was indignantly rejected by Rosalie, but the more she
thought, the more uneasy she became. She ceased to reply to her father's
remarks, and he at last relapsed into gloom, and said that he was tired
and would go to bed. Thereupon she wheeled him inside his bedroom, bade
him good-night, and left him to his moodiness, which, however, was soon
absorbed in a deep sleep, for the mind of the little grey postmaster
could no more hold trouble or thought than a sieve.

Left alone, Rosalie began to be tortured. What were they doing in the
house opposite?

Go and look through the windows? But she had never spied on people in
her life! Yet would it be spying? Would it not be pardonable? In the
interest of the man who had been attacked in the morning by the tailor,