with a smile.

"As soon as she had left me alone with her husband he took both my hands,
and, squeezing them as if he meant to crush them, he said: 'I have been
intending to go and see you for a long time, my dear sir, for my wife has
very often talked to me about you. I know--yes, I know under what
painful circumstances you made her acquaintance, and I know also how
perfectly you behaved, how full of delicacy, tact and devotion you showed
yourself in the affair--' He hesitated and then said in a lower
tone, as if he had been saying something low and coarse, 'in the affair
of that pig of a Morin.'"




SAINT ANTHONY

They called him Saint Anthony, because his name was Anthony, and also,
perhaps, because he was a good fellow, jovial, a lover of practical
jokes, a tremendous eater and a heavy drinker and a gay fellow, although
he was sixty years old.

He was a big peasant of the district of Caux, with a red face, large
chest and stomach, and perched on two legs that seemed too slight for the
bulk of his body.

He was a widower and lived alone with his two men servants and a maid on
his farm, which he conducted with shrewd economy. He was careful of his
own interests, understood business and the raising of cattle, and
farming. His two sons and his three daughters, who had married well, were