every allowance had to be made for poor Mademoiselle in
consideration of the fact that she was torn in pieces by the valiant
attempt to keep her attention focussed upon three children at once. The
effort had not so far been a brilliant success, and Mademoiselle,
conscious within herself of her inability to cope adequately with her
threefold responsibility, being moreover worn out by her gallant struggle
to do so, was inclined to shortness of temper and a severity of judgment
that bordered upon injustice.

If Chris would persist in flying about the shore in that wild fashion
with her hair loose--that flaming hair which Mademoiselle considered in
itself to be almost indecent--what could be expected but that some
_contretemps_ must of necessity arrive? It was useless for Chris to
protest that it was not her hair that had got her into difficulties, that
she had only left it loose to dry it after her bathe, that there had been
no one to see--at least, no one that mattered--and that the cut on her
foot was solely due to the fact that she had taken off her sand-shoes to
climb over the rocks. Mademoiselle only shook her head with pursed lips.
Chris _etait mechante--tres mechante_, and no amount of arguing would
make her change her opinion upon that point.

So Chris abandoned argument while the worried little Frenchwoman bathed
and bandaged her foot anew. She would not be able to bathe again for at
least a week, and this fact was of itself sufficient to depress her into
silence. Yet, after a little, when Mademoiselle was gone, a cheery little
tune rose to her lips. It was not her nature to be depressed for long.

Mademoiselle Gautier would have been something less than human if she had
not yielded now and then under the perpetual strain in which, for many
days past, she had lived. She had come to Valpre in charge of Chris and
her two young brothers, both of whom had developed diphtheria within a
day or two of their arrival. The children's father was absent in India;
his only sister, upon whom the cares of his family were supposed to rest,
was entertaining Royalty, and was far too important a personage in the
social world to be spared at short notice. And so the whole burden had
devolved upon poor Mademoiselle Gautier, who had been near her wits' end
with anxiety, but had nobly grappled with her task.

The worst of the business, speaking in a physical sense, was now over.
Both her patients--Maxwell, who was Chris's twin, and l