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“There was no more beautiful young girl than Laure Giraud at sixteen,” said Jeanne Tallot.

“And none more useless,” said Annot loudly. “Give me a young girl who is industrious and honest. My Margot is better provided for than Laure Giraud was before her marriage; but her hands are not white, nor is her waist but a span around. She has too much work to do. She is not a tall, white, swaying creature who is too good to churn and tend the creatures who give her food. I have heard it said that Laure would have worked if her mother had permitted it, but I don’t believe it. She had not a working look. Mademoiselle Laure was too good for the labor of humble people; she must go to Paris and learn a fine, delicate trade.”

“But good came of it,” put in Jeanne Tallot, “It proved all the better for her.”

“Let her mother thank the Virgin, then,” cried Annot, contemptuously. “It might not have proved the better; ‘it might have proved the worse; evil might have come of it instead of good. Who among us has not heard of such things? Did not Marie Gautier go to Paris too?”

“Ah, poor little one, indeed!” sighed the white caps.

“And in two years,” added Annot, “her mother died of a broken heart.”

“But,” said cheerful Jeanne, somewhat dryly, “Laure’s mother is not dead yet, so let us congratulate ourselves that to go to Paris has brought luck to one of our number at least, and let us deal charitably with Mere Giraud, who certainly means well, and is only naturally proud of her daughter’s grandeur. For my part, I can afford to rejoice with her.”

She rolled up her stout stocking into a ball, and stuck her needles through it, nodding at the three women.

“I promised I would drop in and spend a few minutes with her this morning,” she said; “so I will bid you good-day,” and she stepped across the threshold and trudged off in the sunshine, her wooden shoes sounding bravely on the path.

It was only a little place,–St. Croix, as we shall call it for want of a better name,–a little village of one street, and of many vines, and roses, and orchards, and of much gossip. Simple people inhabited it,–simple, ignorant folk, who knew one another, and discussed one another’s faults and grape-crops with equal frankness, worked hard, lived frugally, confessed regularly, and slept well. Devout people, and ignorant, who believed that the little shrines they erected in their vineyards brought blessings upon their grapes, and who knew nothing of the great world beyond, and spoke of Paris with awe, and even a shade of doubt. Living the same lives generation after generation, tilling the same crops, and praying before the same stone altar in the small, quaint church, it is not to be wondered at that when a change occurred to any one of their number, it was regarded as a sort of social era. There were those in St. Croix who had known Mere Giraud’s grandfather, a slow-spoken, kindly old peasant, who had drunk his vin ordinaire, and smoked his pipe with the poorest; and there was not one who did not well know Mere Giraud herself, and who had not watched the growth of the little Laure, who had bloomed into a beauty not unlike the beauty of the white Provence roses which climbed over and around her mother’s cottage door. “Mere Giraud’s little daughter,” she had been called, even after she grew into the wonderfully tall and wonderfully fair creature she became before she left the village, accompanying her brother Valentin to Paris.

“Ma foi!” said the men, “but she is truly a beauty, Mere Giraud’s little daughter!”

“She should be well looked to,” said the wiseacres,–“Mere Giraud’s little daughter.”

“There is one we must always give way before,” said the best-natured among the girls, “and that one is Mere Giraud’s little daughter.”