At last
she sat down on a bench at the door of her home, and the summer afternoon
spent its glories on her; for the sunflowers and the hollyhocks were
round her, and the warmth gave her face a shining health and joyousness.
There she brooded till she heard the voice of her mother calling across
the meadow; then she got up with a sigh, and softly repeated Parpon's
words: "He is a great man!"
In the middle of that night she started up from a sound sleep, and, with
a little cry, whispered into the silence: "Napoleon--Napoleon!"
She was thinking of Valmond. A revelation had come to her out of her
dreams. But she laughed at it, and buried her face in her pillow and went
to sleep, hoping to dream again.
CHAPTER III
In less than one week Valmond was as outstanding from Pontiac as
Dalgrothe Mountain, just beyond it in the south. His liberality, his
jocundity, his occasional abstraction, his meditative pose, were all his
own; his humour that of the people. He was too quick in repartee and
drollery for a bourgeois, too "near to the bone" in point for an
aristocrat, with his touch of the comedian and the peasant also.
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