s parted; "I heard the Russian gentleman saying
that you were ruined. Is that true, too?"

"Yes, dear," he answered wearily, thinking little of the child in the
desperate pass to which his life had come.

Petite Reine stood by him silent; her proud, imperial young ladyship had
a very tender heart, and she was very sorry; she had understood what
had been said before her of him vaguely indeed, and with no sense of
its true meaning, yet still with the quick perception of a brilliant
and petted child. Looking at her, he saw with astonishment that her eyes
were filled with tears. He put out his hand and drew her to him.

"Why, little one, what do you know of these things? How did you find me
out here?"

She bent nearer to him, swaying her slender figure, with its bright
gossamer muslins, like a dainty hare-bell, and lifting her face to
his--earnest, beseeching, and very eager.

"I came--I came--please don't be angry--because I heard them say you
had no money, and I want you to take mine. Do take it! Look, it is all
bright gold, and it is my own, my very own. Papa gives it to me to do
just what I like with. Do take it; pray do!"

Coloring deeply, for the Petite Reine had that true instinct of generous
natures,--a most sensitive delicacy for others,--but growing ardent in
her eloquence and imploring in her entreaty, she shook on to Cecil's
knee, out of a little enamel sweetmeat box, twenty bright Napoleons that
fell in a glittering shower on the grass.

He started, and looked at her in a silence that she mistook for offense.
She leaned nearer, pale now with her excitement, and with her large eyes
gleaming and melting with passionate entreaty.

"Don't be angry; pray take it; it is all my own, and you know I have
bonbons, and books, and playthings, and ponies, and dogs till I am tired
of them; I never want the money; indeed I don't. Take it, please take
it; and if you will only let me ask Papa or Rock they will give you
thousands and thousands of pounds, if that isn't enough. Do let me!"

Cecil, in silence still, stooped and drew her to him. When he spoke his
voice shook ever so slightly, and he felt his eyes dim with an emotion
that he had not known in all his careless life; the child's words and
action touched him deeply, the caressing, generous innocence of the
offered gift, beside the enormous extravagance and hopeless bankruptcy
of his career, smote him with a keen pang, yet moved him with a strange
pleasure.

"