“Ah! mademoiselle,” remarked Mariotte, “you can’t prevent the town from gossiping.”

“What do they say?” asked the baroness.

“The young girls and the old women all say that he is in love with Mademoiselle des Touches.”

“A lad of Calyste’s make is playing his proper part in making the women love him,” said the baron.

“Here comes Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel,” said Mariotte.

The gravel in the court-yard crackled under the discreet footsteps of the coming lady, who was accompanied by a page supplied with a lantern.  Seeing this lad, Mariotte removed her stool to the great hall for the purpose of talking with him by the gleam of his rush-light, which was burned at the cost of his rich and miserly mistress, thus economizing those of her own masters.

This elderly demoiselle was a thin, dried-up old maid, yellow as the parchment of a Parliament record, wrinkled as a lake ruffled by the wind, with gray eyes, large prominent teeth, and the hands of a man.  She was rather short, a little crooked, possibly hump-backed; but no one had ever been inquisitive enough to ascertain the nature of her perfections or her imperfections.  Dressed in the same style as Mademoiselle du Guenic, she stirred an enormous quantity of petticoats and linen whenever she wanted to find one or other of the two apertures of her gown through which she reached her pockets.  The strangest jingling of keys and money then echoed among her garments.  She always wore, dangling from one side, the bunch of keys of a good housekeeper, and from the other her silver snuff-box, thimble, knitting-needles, and other implements that were also resonant.  Instead of Mademoiselle Zephirine’s wadded hood, she wore a green bonnet, in which she may have visited her melons, for it had passed, like them, from green to yellowish; as for its shape, our present fashions are just now bringing it back to Paris, after twenty years absence, under the name of Bibi.  This bonnet was constructed under her own eye and by the hands of her nieces, out of green Florence silk bought at Guerande, and an old bonnet-shape, renewed every five years at Nantes,—­for Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoel allowed her bonnets the longevity of a legislature.  Her nieces also made her gowns, cut by an immutable pattern.  The old lady still used the cane with the short hook that all women carried in the early days of Marie-Antoinette.  She belonged to the very highest nobility of Brittany.  Her arms bore the ermine of its ancient dukes.  In her and in her sister the illustrious Breton house of the Pen-Hoels ended.  Her younger sister had married a Kergarouet, who, in spite of the deep disapproval of the whole region, added the name of Pen-Hoel to his own and called himself the Vicomte de Kergarouet-Pen-Hoel.

“Heaven has punished him,” said the old lady; “he has nothing but daughters, and the Kergarouet-Pen-Hoel name will be wiped out.”