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XI
The Belle of the Village
AND after all, when he had brushed the dust of travel from his clothes and from his horse's harness, when he had mounted the gray, and when he had learned the road, he felt that there was no retreat and that he must forget that anxious night as though it had been a dangerous dream.
He found Father Leonard seated on a trim bench of spinach-green. The six stone steps leading up to the door showed that the house had a cellar. The walls of the garden and of the hemp-field were plastered with lime and sand. It was a handsome house, and might almost have been mistaken for the dwelling of a bourgeois.
Germain's future father-in-law came forward to meet him, and having plied him, for five minutes, with questions concerning his entire family, he added
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