"Where are you, Suzanne? Here's your father coming. Quick, Jorancé, the children are here. Yes, yes, your daughter, too.... I brought her back with me from Saint-Élophe.... But how did you come? Through the woods?"
Suzanne slipped on a pair of long suède gloves and, at the moment when the door opened, said, in a tone of implacable resolve and as though the promise must needs fill Philippe's heart with delight:
"No one shall ever see my bare arms again.... No one, Philippe, I swear to you.... No one shall ever stroke them...."
CHAPTER III
THE VIOLET PAMPHLET
Jorancé was a heavy and rather unwieldy, pleasant-faced man. Twenty-five years before, when secretary to the commissary at Noirmont, he had married a girl of entrancing beauty, who used to teach the piano in a boarding-school. One evening, after four years of marriage, four years of torture, during which the unhappy man suffered every sort of humiliation, Jorancé came home to find the house empty. His wife had gone without a word of explanation, taking their little girl, Suzanne, with her.
The only thing that kept him from suicide was the hope of recovering the child and saving her from the life which her mother's example would have forced upon her in the future.
He did not have to look for her long. A month later, his wife sent back the child, who was no doubt in her way. But the wound had cut deep and lingered; and neither time nor the love which he bore his daughter could wipe out the memory of that cruel story.