This the high-spirited youth could not bear, and he left his uncle's house within twenty-four hours, with a fixed resolution never to return.

He had come back to the village, resolved, he said, to lead a peasant's life of toil, rather than live with a relative who could so far forget himself as to remind him of his dependence.
Poor Blanche was deeply grieved.

All her fond hopes for her son were at an end.

She looked at his small, delicate hands and slender pro-portions, and wept when she thought of a peasant's life of hard labor.
A very long time did not pass before Nina made a proposition to Blanche, that relieved, in some measure, the painful depression under which she labored.

It was this.