very now and then in the narrow cliff-path to
strike flint to tinder or to refill the tiny bowl of his pipe, which a
dozen puffs always exhausted.

"Oh, they all abuse us," said the child, serenely. "You see, you are
a stranger and don't understand; but you will if you live here."

"Why is everybody unkind to you?" I asked, after a moment.

"Why? Oh, because I am what I am and my father is the Lizard."

"A poacher?"

"Ah," she said, looking up at me with delicious malice, "what is a
poacher, monsieur?"

"Sometimes he's a fine fellow gone wrong," I said, laughing. "So I
don't believe any ill of your father, or of you, either. Will you drum
for me, Jacqueline?"

"For you, monsieur? Why, yes. What am I to read for you?"

I gave her a hand-bill; at the first glance her eyes sparkled, the
color deepened under her coat of amber tan; she caught her breath and
read rapidly to the end.

"Oh, how beautiful," she said, softly. "Am I to read this in the
square?"

"I will give you a franc to read it, Jacqueline."

"No, no--only--oh, do let me come in and see the heavenly wonders!
Would you, monsieur? I--I cannot pay--but would--_could_ you let me
come in? I will read your notice, anyway," she added, with a quaver in
her voice.

The flushed face, the eager, upturned eyes, deep blue as the sea, the
little hands clutching the show-bill, which fairly quivered between
the tanned fingers--all these touched and amused me. The child was mad
with excitement.

What she anticipated, Heaven only knows. Shabby and tarnished as we
were, the language of our hand-bills made up in gaudiness for the
dingy reality.

"Come whenever you like, Jacqueline," I said. "Ask for me at the
gate."

"And who are you, monsieur?"

"My name is Scarlett."

"Scarlett," she whispered, as though naming a sacred thing.

The mayor, who had toddled some distance ahead of us, now halted in
the square, looking back at us through the red evening light.

"Jacqueline, the drum is in my house. I'll lend you a pair of sabots,
too. Come, hasten little idler!"

We entered the mayor's garden, where the flowers were glowing in the
lustre of the setting sun. I sat down in a chair; Jacqueline waited,
hands resting on her hips, small, shapely toes restlessly brushing the
grass.

"Truly this coming wonder-show will be a peep into paradise," she
murmured. "Can all be true--really true as it is printed here in this
bill--I wonder--"

Before she had time to s