d you like it?"

If further startled she was humanized by his warmth, which was melting
her; her breast heaved, her lips trembled, and she asked: "Et
puis--maman?"

Here Madame Branchard, in whom all feelings were subordinate to
curiosity and motherhood, had approached until she stood directly
behind the two on the terrace. Tears had sprung to her eyes and she
sniffled and wiped them frankly away with her hand.

Bulstrode, singularly relieved by her appearance, turned and asked her,
"What does she then know?"

"Nothing, m'sieur, nothing at all."

Simone got up on her feet and her big doll fell with a crash on the
marble of the terrace and broke in a dozen pieces, but the catastrophe
did not touch her.

"And maman?" she repeated. "Where is she? She did not come home last
night?"

Bulstrode had descended to one knee in order to approach her, but
Madame Branchard got down on both knees and tenderly put her arms
around the child.

"Look, ma petite--your mother has gone away forever to a beautiful
country, and she has left you here to be a good girl and do whatever
this kind gentleman says. Will you go to be his little girl? He will
give you everything in the world." She closed with this magnificent
promise, whose breadth and wealth no child-mind could grasp. In order
to give her more complete liberty in which to make her decision the
wine-merchant's wife, after kissing her, set her free.

Simone made no audible reflection of wonder at her seeming desertion,
no exhibition of distress, no melodramatic outburst of grief or
surprise. She stood silent, absorbed, desolate, and ashamed, twisting
in and out between her frail little fingers the fringe of Madame
Branchard's black shawl.

"Or," brightly continued the good woman, "you can come home with me and
play with Marie and Jeannette and have what we have. You can be my
little girl, as you will--it is for you to decide--chez moi, or with
this bon monsieur."

Was it fair of them--thus to lay on her six years the burden of her own
destiny?

Simone raised her head; her cheeks had reddened a little at Madame
Branchard's last words. She was unable to grasp the benefits that
Bulstrode's magnificence offered, but she knew Marie and Jeannette--she
knew the hands of Madame Branchard could tuck one in at night, and how
warm and soft was the bosom on which she had already wept her little
griefs. There were many beautiful things in the world, but Simone just
then