The cottage in which Guida lived at the Place du Vier Prison was in jocund contrast to the dungeon from which the Chevalier Orvilliers du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir had complacently issued.

Even in the hot summer the prison walls dripped moisture, for the mortar had been made of wet sea-sand, which never dried, and beneath the gloomy tenement of crime a dark stream flowed to the sea.

But the walls of the cottage were dry, for, many years before, Guida's mother had herself seen it built from cellar-rock to the linked initials over the doorway, stone by stone, and every corner of it was as free from damp as the mielles stretching in sandy desolation behind to the Mont es Pendus, where the law had its way with the necks of criminals.
In early childhood Madame Landresse had come with her father into exile from the sunniest valley in the hills of Chambery, where flowers and trees and sunshine had been her life.

Here, in the midst of blank and grim stone houses, her heart travelled back to the chateau where she lived before the storm of persecution drove her forth; and she spent her heart and her days in making this cottage, upon the western border of St.Heliers, a delight to the quiet eye.
The people of the island had been good to her and her dead husband during the two short years of their married life, and had caused her to love the land which necessity made her home.

Her child was brought up after the fashion of the better class of Jersey children, wore what they wore, ate what they ate, lived as they lived.