Agathe and Joseph arrived at the coach-office of the Messageries-Royales in the place Misere at three o'clock.

Though tired with the journey, Madame Bridau felt her youth revive at sight of her native land, where at every step she came upon memories and impressions of her girlish days.

In the then condition of public opinion in Issoudun, the arrival of the Parisians was known all over the town in ten minutes.

Madame Hochon came out upon her doorstep to welcome her godchild, and kissed her as though she were really a daughter.

After seventy-two years of a barren and monotonous existence, exhibiting in their retrospect the graves of her three children, all unhappy in their lives, and all dead, she had come to feel a sort of fictitious motherhood for the young girl whom she had, as she expressed it, carried in her pouch for sixteen years.