here it is; but this is another kind of game, and while we're eating,
I'll tell you the whole story," which he at once proceeded to do, for,
hungry as they were, they all fell to with scant ceremony.

The next morning the blond lady, being bereft of both escorts, started
out for a stroll on her own account.

You have before this, doubtless, divined her to be the wife of that same
little man Sara had met on the cliff; and we now formally introduce her
as Madame Grandet, wife of Professor Leon Alphonse Grandet, of the
Academie des Sciences at Paris, who was now prosecuting his geological
studies in New England.

She herself was endowed with no mean artistic talent, her specialty
being the painting of flowers in water colors, and, as she always
sketched from nature, she had become almost as much of a botanical
student as her husband was a mineralogical.

But this morning the quaintness and quiet of the village tempted her
into a stroll down its long street, before she should seek the pine
woods farther back, in search of hidden beauties, and one picture that
she came upon held her spell bound for a moment. This was a small, poor
cottage, painted only by the sun and rain, before which, on a tiny
square of green, a baby was rolling about--a cunning little fellow with
rings of silky light hair, while on the low doorstep sat a girl of such
unusual appearance that the lady stared in undisguised admiration.

Her head was bent above a book, and the auburn shades of her luxuriant
hair caught the sunlight in every wave and tendril; her eyes were cast
down, but the dark lashes curled upward from the slightly flushed cheek