"M. le Curé, there is a strange lady walking along the road!"
The curé looked. A lady, a stranger, was going past the château. She was simply but tastefully dressed, and she carried in her hand a large bouquet of wild flowers. As the man and the boy on the terrace watched her with interest, for strangers were not common in the village, she turned and called to some one, and then a little girl appeared round a turn in the road, and ran towards her.
"What a pretty little girl!" cried Bertrand; "I wonder who they are, and how they came here!"
"They are Americans," answered the priest, who now remembered hearing that a small villa half a mile away had been rented for the season. "They are at the house in the woods over there; I was told that the mother paints pictures from nature. They look like people of good standing—of culture."
