ed her
commands. "Would it please you to receive instruction in our beautiful
language?" he inquired, with an appealing quaver.

"To study French?" asked Newman, staring.

M. Nioche pressed his finger-tips together and slowly raised his
shoulders. "A little conversation!"

"Conversation--that's it!" murmured Mademoiselle Noemie, who had caught
the word. "The conversation of the best society."

"Our French conversation is famous, you know," M. Nioche ventured to
continue. "It's a great talent."

"But isn't it awfully difficult?" asked Newman, very simply.

"Not to a man of esprit, like monsieur, an admirer of beauty in every
form!" and M. Nioche cast a significant glance at his daughter's
Madonna.

"I can't fancy myself chattering French!" said Newman with a laugh. "And
yet, I suppose that the more a man knows the better."

"Monsieur expresses that very happily. Helas, oui!"

"I suppose it would help me a great deal, knocking about Paris, to know
the language."

"Ah, there are so many things monsieur must want to say: difficult
things!"

"Everything I want to say is difficult. But you give lessons?"

Poor M. Nioche was embarrassed; he smiled more appealingly. "I am not a
regular professor," he admitted. "I can't nevertheless tell him that I'm
a professor," he said to his daughter.

"Tell him it's a very exceptional chance," answered Mademoiselle Noemie;
"an homme du monde--one gentleman conversing with another! Remember what
you are--what you have been!"

"A teacher of languages in neither case! Much more formerly and much
less to-day! And if he asks the price of the lessons?"

"He won't ask it," said Mademoiselle Noemie.

"What he pleases, I may say?"

"Never! That's bad style."

"If he asks, then?"

Mademoiselle Noemie had put on her bonnet and was tying the ribbons.
She smoothed them out, with her soft little chin thrust forward. "Ten
francs," she said quickly.

"Oh, my daughter! I shall never dare."

"Don't dare, then! He won't ask till the end of the lessons, and then I
will make out the bill."

M. Nioche turned to the confiding foreigner again, and stood rubbing
his hands, with an air of seeming to plead guilty which was not intenser
only because it was habitually so striking. It never occurred to Newman
to ask him for a guarantee of his skill in imparting instruction; he
supposed of course M. Nioche knew his own language, and his appealing
forlornness was quite the perfection of what