Peter and Adeline land in Savoy, and Peter walks beside her horse declaring that French hills are not to be named on the same day as his. He gives his last sous to the barefoot children who run alongside and speaks only of the contentment of his countrymen, forgetting everything the country lacks. His village, though, really is an exception: it is flourishing and healthy because of its benevolent pastor. Adeline, worn out by anxiety and the steep, flinty road, is welcomed by Peter's sister into a small, neat cottage, and she lies awake weeping that in her whole life she has "never known a friend". Her fever worsens, there is neither physician nor apothecary in the village, and on the third day she becomes delirious and then sinks into stupor.
When her senses return she is in a spacious, elegant room, and a beautiful girl draws back the bed curtain to ask, with tenderness and joy, how she does. An elderly lady tells her only that she will learn whose house this is hereafter, and that she must keep quiet. Adeline lies thinking that the change from grief and despair to comfort is like the sudden shifts of a dream, and she looks ahead to the future with trembling anxiety. Here the narrator stops the story, says so openly, and promises a picture "drawn from the life". It shows Arnaud La Luc, pastor of Leloncourt, a widower whose grief for his wife has made him gentle towards other people's troubles. He is raising a son and a daughter, Clara, with the help of his sister, Madame La Luc, who prides herself on the medicines she prepares for the whole village.
The portrait turns on one episode. La Luc gives Clara a lute, and she plays for three days until she forgets to carry the weekly allowance to a sick woman, whose children, her brother reports, had no food that day. La Luc will not scold her: "Let experience teach her her error." Clara vows to leave the lute alone for a day, breaks the vow on a moonlit evening by the lake, and then argues herself into doubt. If she could not keep a promise when nothing depended on it, how would she keep one when something did? "Since I cannot conquer temptation, I will fly from it," she says, and asks her father to keep the lute. He gives it back, weeping because she so resembles her mother. Her brother leaves for Geneva, and four years pass.
Then the narrator rejoins Adeline. Peter's sister, who loves a marvellous story, comes to Madame La Luc for medicine for the young stranger Peter has brought, and she exaggerates the tale as she tells it. Clara begs to go with her. They find Adeline pale and unconscious in a close room. Madame hears from Peter only that his late master found Adeline in distress and that he brought her from the abbey to save her from a French Marquis. She teases Clara about her "romantic notion of judging people by their faces", but Clara has already promised that her father will be a parent to the stranger and she herself a sister. La Luc says at once that Adeline must be brought to the chateau, and Madame insists on waiting until morning, since moving her at night would be dangerous. Adeline is carried over wrapped in blankets, and towards evening, with Clara still at the bedside, her senses return. The narrator finishes by saying the reader will find that the family's virtues deserved this notice.
