nuously, to discipline the sensitive
nature, bursting her heart with grief at times because she knew that
these high feelings and delicate powers came through a long line of
ancestral tendencies, as indestructible as perilous and joyous.

Four things were always apparent in the girl's character: sympathy with
suffering, kindness without partiality, a love of nature, and an intense
candour.

Not a stray cat wandering into the Place du Vier Prison but found an
asylum in the garden behind the cottage. Not a dog hungry for a bone,
stopping at Guida's door, but was sure of one from a hiding-place in
the hawthorn hedge of the garden. Every morning you might have seen
the birds in fluttering, chirping groups upon the may-tree or the
lilac-bushes, waiting for the tiny snow-storm of bread to fall from
her hand. Was he good or bad, ragged or neat, honest or a thief, not a
deserting sailor or a homeless lad, halting at the cottage, but was fed
from the girl's private larder behind the straw beehives among the sweet
lavender and the gooseberry-bushes. No matter how rough the vagrant,
the sincerity and pure impulse of the child seemed to throw round him a
sunshine of decency and respect.

The garden behind the house was the girl's Eden. She had planted upon
the hawthorn hedge the crimson monthly rose, the fuchsia, and the
jonquil, until at last the cottage was hemmed in by a wall of flowers;
and here she was ever as busy as the bees which hung humming on the
sweet scabious.

In this corner was a little hut for rabbits; in that, there was a hole
dug in the bank for a hedgehog; in the middle a little flower-grown
enclosure for cats in various stages of health or convalescence, and a
small pond for frogs; and in the midst of all wandered her faithful dog,
Biribi by name, as master of the ceremonies.

Madame Landresse's one ambition had been to live long enough to see her
child's character formed. She knew that her own years were numbered, for
month by month she felt her strength going. And yet a beautiful tenacity
kept her where she would be until Guida was fifteen years of age. Her
great desire had been to live till the girl was eighteen. Then--well,
then might she not perhaps leave her to the care of a husband? At best,
M. de Mauprat could not live long. He had at last been forced to give
up the little watchmaker's shop in the Vier Marchi, where for so many
years, in simple independence, he had wrought, always putting by, from