Two days later the result of the arrangement stood before us. She was
standing with her arms crossed, her fingers clasping her elbows--with
her very best peasant manner. She was neatly, and, for a peasant,
almost fashionably attired in her holiday dress--a short, black skirt,
white stockings, a flowery kerchief crossed over her broad bosom, and
on her pretty hair a richly tinted blue _foulard_. She was very well
dressed for a peasant, and, from the point of view of two travellers,
of about as much use as a plough.

"It's a beautiful scheme, and it's as dramatic as the fifth act of a
play; but what shall we do with her?"

"Oh." replied Charm, carelessly, "there isn't anything in particular
for her to do. I mean to buy her a lot of clothes, like those she has
on, and she can walk about in the garden or in the fields."

"Ah, I see; she's to be a kind of a perambulating figure-piece."

"Yes, that's about it. I dare say she will be very useful at sunset, in
a dim street; so few peasants wear anything approaching to costume
nowadays."

Ernestine herself, however, as we soon discovered, had an entirely
different conception of her vocation. She was a vigorous, active young
woman, with the sap of twenty summers in her lusty young veins. Her
energies soon found vent in a continuous round of domestic excitements.
There were windows and floors that cried aloud to Heaven to be
scrubbed; there were holes in the sheets to make mam'zelle's lying
between them _une honte, une vraie honte_. As for Madame Fouchet's
little weekly bill, _Dieu de Dieu_, it was filled with such extortions