It was simply this, that their tempers were alike; and when on an occasion Michel told his son that he would not allow a certain piece of folly which the son was, as he thought, likely to commit, George declared that he would soon set that matter right by leaving Granpere.

Accordingly he did leave Granpere, and became the right hand, and indeed the head, and backbone, and best leg of his old cousin Madame Faragon of the Poste at Colmar.

Now the matter on which these few words occurred was a question of love--whether George Voss should fall in love with and marry his step-mother's niece Marie Bromar.

But before anything farther can be said of these few words, Madame Voss and her niece must be introduced to the reader.
Madame Voss was nearly twenty years younger than her husband, and had now been a wife some five or six years.

She had been brought from Epinal, where she had lived with a married sister, a widow, much older than herself--in parting from whom on her marriage there had been much tribulation.