In was then that Charles Mignon, Comte de La Bastie, a title he never used, crowned his cashier with the final happiness of residing at the Chalet, where at the time when this story begins Madame Mignon and her daughter were living in obscurity.
The deplorable state of Madame Mignon's health was caused in part by the catastrophe to which the absence of her husband was due.

Grief had taken three years to break down the docile German woman; but it was a grief that gnawed at her heart like a worm at the core of a sound fruit.

It is easy to reckon up its obvious causes.

Two children, dying in infancy, had a double grave in a soul that could never forget.

The exile of her husband to Siberia was to such a woman a daily death.