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 her word, and went to the young maiden who had allured the eyes and heart of Bernadou.

Margot was an orphan: she had not a penny to her dower; she had been brought up on charity, and she dwelt now in the family of the largest landowner of the place, a miller, with a numerous offspring, and several head of cattle, and many stretches of pasture and of orchard.

Margot worked for a hard master, living, indeed, as one of the family, but sharply driven all day long at all manner of house-work and field-work. Reine Allix had kept her glance on her, through some instinctive sense of the way that Bernadou's thoughts were turning, and she had seen much to praise, nothing to chide, in the young girl's modest, industrious, cheerful, uncomplaining life.

Margot was very pretty too, with the brown oval face, and the great black soft eyes, and the beautiful form of the southern blood that had run in the veins of her father, who had been a sailor of Marseilles, whilst her mother had been a native of the Provençal country. Altogether, Reine Allix knew that her beloved one could not have done better or more wisely, if choose at all he must.

"Some people indeed," she said to herself as she climbed the street whose sharp-set flints had been trodden by her wooden shoes for ninety years—