she drew—drew very prettily, too. Big classical
heads with round chins, vacant eyes, broad foreheads,
and tresses like coils of rope. These
she finished in Italian chalk on tinted paper, to
the delight of her professor, who was a mighty
man from the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Did she
paint? Yes, flowers, and a little landscape.
Anything else? Well, she embroidered charmingly;
was not too fond of novel reading for a
girl of her age, choosing even then the demurest
of fictions, and utterly eschewing the fascinating
but perilous MM. Dumas and Paul de Kock.
She was very good and pious. She went regularly
to mass, and has ses pauvres- her poor,
whom she tended and succoured quite as though
she had been a staid middle-aged person. As
yet, her heart has said nothing to her. She had
been to a ball but thrice in her life. Men, with
the exception of Monsieur Philibert, she regarded
as sweet and noble creatures, but still as
devouring monsters to be feared and fled from.
Ces terribles Monsieurs, she called them. Monsieur
Philibert she did not fear. He was old
and fat, and she had known him long, and he
was papa's good friend.

Little Amanda's mamma was dead. Nobody
but herself, her father, and a bonne, lived on
the first (and consequently top) floor of the
Edifice. Down stairs there were people who
took care of the lodgers, but she never saw
them. There was a side-door for her to go
out at, and once a week or so, when business
was slack—for the lodgers were very capricious
as to the time of their coming, though
exceedingly regular as to that of their going—
Amanda's papa would take her to dine en ville,
and then to some little boulevard theatre, whence
she would come back skipping and clapping her
hands, and humming over the airs of the vaudeville
couplets she had heard. The little girl
was as good as gold, and as happy as the day
was long.

On the very same morning that Jean Baptiste
Constant was entertaining his friends at the
Café Restaurant Chesterfield, Amanda, too, had
company in the first floor of the Edifice. Lily
was there. Now, I am afraid that Madame de
Kergolay would have been very angry indeed
had she known that her protégée was paying
such a visit, or was in such a place. It was,
perhaps, the queerest place in the world for a
young lady who was being educated in genteel
notions to find herself in. But it was all
Madame Thomas's fault. That good woman
could see that Lily was unhappy, that she was
mourning in secret. She half divined the cause
of her sorrow. She strove to assuage it by
every means in her power, to divert the young
girl's mind, and to lead her to more cheerful
thoughts. " Ces jeunesses—these young ones
are always the same. They get an idea into
their heads, and it takes a hydraulic machine to
get it out again. Let us try to amuse her. Let
us strive to make her gay. She must be dull
sometimes in that old place of ours. Yes, she
must be in love. Malediction upon love, and
yet one can hardly help blessing it at the same
time. What an old fool I am! If Ma'amselle
Lily is in love, I cannot expect her to make a
confidante of an old, worn-out, battered thing
like me. Let us place her in contact with,
something young, and fresh, and innocent, to
whom she can tell half her secret, and who will
guess the rest. Did I say young, and fresh,
and innocent? Ah, ma foi, they are all ready
to guess ce calembourg-là. They can all find
out what love is. Allons, I will take her to see
Amanda. There can be no harm in that."

Amanda was one of Madame Thomas's great
cronies. She had known and loved her, ever
since she was a little child. She had an awful
reverence for Amanda's papa, whom she called
Monsieur le Gardien; she had known his wife,
that amiable blonde woman, with a perpetual
cold in her head, which had ultimately got into
her stomach, and so, reaching her feet, killed
her. She entertained the profoundest respect
for Monsieur Philibert, who, whenever he met
her, rarely failed to regale her with the latest
on dits and the choicest snuff. The first floor
over the Edifice was, indeed, Madame Thomas's
great gossiping shop. Whenever she had half
an hour to spare, she would slip away and revel
in chat. Nor did her patronage of the Edifice
stop there. Madame Thomas wasn't exactly a
ghoule. She wasn't a vampire. She had no
cruelty in her composition. She was a very
kind-hearted old woman, well enough disposed
to be jovial on occasion; but she had, in common
with a great number of other old women, a
secret and irresistible penchant for that which
some persons are accustomed to call the horrible.
She couldn't help it. About people's tastes
it is useless to dispute. Everybody has his
taste, his whim, his fancy, his hobby. Madame
Thomas had hers. She did not carry it
to excess, but she was forced to gratify it
sometimes. She liked to trot down stairs, at
the termination of her gossip on the first floor
of the Edifice, and see how the lodgers were
getting on. It did her good. She liked it,
although she was not very far removed from
that period of life when she might reasonably
expect to become a lodger herself, a permanent
one, although not in that edifice. Sometimes
the lodgers were green, and Madame Thomas
would take a great deal of snuff; sometimes
they were blue, at which she would take more,
and cry " Pouah!" And not unfrequently they
would be both green and blue.

Amanda did her best to entertain her guests.
She bustled about, putting her birds through
the most winning of their ways, and by clever
tapping at the bars of their cages, and tempting
them with bits of sugar between her pretty
lips, eliciting from them the sweetest of their
carols. Of her flowers, too, she made great
show, blowing aside their petals, and turning
up their delicate leaves to show her visitors.
Then she sat down to the piano, and played
some of her liveliest pieces; and then—no
severer critics being near than a young girl as
innocent as herself, and an old woman who
knew no more of music than she did of Greek—