wicked, and she had promised Clotilde,--that droll little
saint,--to resort to them no more. Hereafter, she should do nothing of
the sort, except, to be sure, to take such ordinary precautions against
misfortune as casting upon the floor a little of whatever she might be
eating or drinking to propitiate M. Assonquer. She would have liked,
could she have done it without fear of detection, to pour upon the front
door-sill an oblation of beer sweetened with black molasses to Papa
Lebat (who keeps the invisible keys of all the doors that admit
suitors), but she dared not; and then, the hound would surely have
licked it up. Ah me! was she forgetting that she was a widow?

She was in poor plight to meet the all but icy gray morning; and, to
make her misery still greater, she found, on dressing, that an accident
had overtaken her, which she knew to be a trustworthy sign of love grown
cold. She had lost--alas! how can we communicate it in English!--a small
piece of lute-string ribbon, about _so long_, which she used for--not a
necktie exactly, but--

And she hunted and hunted, and couldn't bear to give up the search, and
sat down to breakfast and ate nothing, and rose up and searched again
(not that she cared for the omen), and struck the hound with the broom,
and broke the broom, and hunted again, and looked out the front window,
and saw the rain beginning to fall, and dropped into a chair--crying,
"Oh! Clotilde, my child, my child! the rent collector will be here
Saturday and turn us into the street!" and so fell a-weeping.

A little tear-letting lightened her unrevealable burden, and she rose,
rejoicing that Clotilde had happened to be out of eye-and-ear-shot. The
scanty fire in the fireplace was ample to warm the room; the fire within
her made it too insufferably hot! Rain or no rain, she parted the
window-curtains and lifted the sash. What a mark for Love's arrow she
was, as, at the window, she stretched her two arms upward! And, "right
so," who should chance to come cantering by, the big drops of rain
pattering after him, but the knightliest man in that old town, and the
fittest to perfect the fine old-fashioned poetry of the scene!

"Clotilde," said Aurora, turning from her mirror, whither she had
hastened to see if her face showed signs of tears (Clotilde was entering
the room), "we shall never be turned out of this house by Honore
Grandissime!"

"Why?" asked Clotilde, stopping short in the floor, forgetting Aurora'