of Him anywhere!  If what you priests tell us were true, poor souls such as I am, would get comfort and help in our sorrows, but it is all a lie!—­the whole thing!—­and when we are in trouble, we have got to bear it as best we can, without so much as a kind word from our neighbours, let alone any pity from the saints.  Go to mass again?  Not I!—­nor to confession either!—­and no more of my earnings will click into your great brass collection plate, mon reverend!  Ah no!—­I have been a foolish woman indeed, to trust so long in a God who for all my tears and prayers never gives me a sign or a hope of an answer,—­and though I suppose this wretched world of ours was made by somebody, whoever it is that has done it is a cruel creature at best, so I say,—­without as much good feeling as there is in the heart of an ordinary man, and without the sense of the man either!  For who that thinks twice about it would make a world where everything is only born to die?—­and for no other use at all!  Bah!  It is sheer folly and wickedness to talk to me of a God!—­a God, if there were one, would surely be far above torturing the creatures He has made, all for nothing!”

And the priest who heard this blasphemous and savage tirade on the part of Martine Doucet, retreated from her in amazement and horror, and presently gave out that she was possessed of a devil, and was unfit to be admitted to the Holy Sacrament.  Whereat, when she heard of it, Martine laughed loudly and ferociously.

“Look you!—­what a charitable creature a priest is!” she cried—­“If you don’t do the things he considers exactly right and fitting, he tells your neighbours that the devil has got you!—­and so little does he care to pick you out of the clutches of this same devil, that he refuses you the Sacrament, though that is said to drive away Satan by the mere touch of it!  But wait till I ask to have the Sacrament given to me!—­it will be time enough then to refuse it!  Many a fat chicken of my stock has the reverend father had as a free gift to boil in his soup maigre!” and again she laughed angrily—­” But no more of them does he get to comfort his stomach while doing penance for his soul!—­the hypocrite!  He must find another silly woman to cheat with his stories of a good God who never does anything but kill and curse us every one!—­he has had all that he will ever get out of Martine Doucet!”

It was to this redoubtable virago that Henri and Babette had betaken themselves in the market place directly school was over.  She always held the same stall in the same position on market days,—­and she sat under her red umbrella on a rough wooden bench, knitting rapidly, now keeping an eye on her little lame son, coiled up in a piece of matting beside her, and anon surveying her stock-in-trade of ducks and geese and fowls, which were heaped on her counter, their wrung necks drooping limply from the board, and their yellow feet tied helplessly together and shining