When Barbe lost her gold earring, did not Saint Joseph find it for her, and tell her to look among the potato-parings that had been thrown out the day before?
and there, sure enough, it was, and the pigs never touching it, because they had been told not to touch! Well, and if the saints could do that, it would be a pity indeed if the Good Lord could not make the sun dance when he felt like doing a kind thing for a poor girl.
With the dazzle of that dancing sun still in her eyes, with happy thoughts filling her mind, Marie turned the corner of the straggling road that was called a street by the people who lived along it,--turned the corner, and almost fell into the arms of a man, who was coming in the opposite direction.

Both uttered a cry at the same moment: Marie first giving a little startled shriek, but her voice dying away in terrified silence as she saw the man's face; the latter uttering a shout of delight, of fierce and cruel triumph, that rang out strangely in the quiet morning air.

For this was Le Boss! A man with a bloated, cruel face, sodden with drink and inflamed with all fierce and inhuman passions; a strong man, who held the trembling girl by the shoulder as if she were a reed, and gazed into her face with eyes of fiendish triumph; an angry man, who poured out a torrent of furious words, reproaching, threatening, by turns, as he found his victim once more within his grasp, just when he had given up all hope of finding her again.

Ah, but he had her now, though! let her try it again, to run away! she would find even this time that she had enough, but another time--and on and on, as a coarse and brutal man can go on to a helpless creature that is wholly in his power.
Marie was silent, cowering in his grasp, looking about with hunted, despairing eyes.

There was nothing to do, no word to say that would help.