two hundred and twenty sheets, every one linen, varying
from the delightfully rough old homespun and home-
woven ones, dating from nobody knew when, down to the
smooth, fine, glossy ones with deep hemstitching on the
top and bottom, and Madeleine's initials set in a deli-
cately embroidered wreath. Of course she had pillow-
slips to go with them, and piles of woolen blankets,
fluffy, soft and white, and a big puffy eiderdown covered
with bright satin as the finishing touch for each well-
furnished bed. Madeleine pretended to be modern some-
times, and to say it was absurd to have so many, but
in her heart, inherited from long generations of passion-
ately home-keeping women, she took immense satisfac-
tion in all the ample furnishings of her pretty little home.
What woman would not?

Now, although all this has a great deal to do with
what happened to Madeleine, I am afraid you will think
that I am making too long an inventory of her house,
so I will not tell you about the shining silver in the
buffet drawers, nor even about the beautiful old walled
garden, full of flowers and vines and fruit-trees, which
lay at the back of the pharmacy. The back windows
of the new bride's habitation looked down into the tree-
tops of this garden, and along its graveled walks her
children were to run and play.

For very soon the new family began to grow: first, a
little blue-eyed girl like Madeleine; then, two years later,
a dark-eyed boy like Jules--all very suitable and as it
should be, like everything else that happened to Made-

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