g with him. That's grand!" Then she went back to the story:

"The child was taken from the convent in the night and by somber-clad
servants who seemed in a great hurry. She was brought a long way to a
chateau, one of the oldest and most beautiful in the south of France;
and a small, shrivel-faced man in royal clothes met her at the door
and carried her up great marble stairs to a chamber lighted by two
tall candles, just. They stopped on the threshold for a breath, and
the child saw that a woman was lying in the canopied bed--a very,
very beautiful woman. To the child she seemed some goddess--or saint.

"'Here is the child,' said the man; and the woman answered: 'Alone,
Rene. Remember you promised--alone.'

"After that the man left them together--the dying woman and her
child. Ah!--how can I be telling you the way she fondled and caressed
her! How starved were the lips that touched the child's hair, cheeks,
and eyelids! And when her strength failed she drew the child into her
tired arms and whispered fragments of prayers, haunting memories,
pitiful regrets. Of all the things she said the child remembered but
one: 'Gold buys plenty for the body, but nothing for the
heart--nothing--nothing!'

"And that kept repeating itself over and over in the child's mind.
She remembered it all through the night after they had taken her away
from those lifeless arms and she lay awake alone in a terrifying,
dark room; she remembered it all through the long day when she sat
beside the gorgeous catafalque that held her mother, and watched the
tall candles in the dim chapel burn lower and lower and lower. And
that was why she refused to stay afterward--and be taken care of by
the shrivel-faced man in that oldest and most beautiful chateau.
Instead she slipped out early one morning, before any one was awake
to see and mark the way she went. It is unbelievable, sometimes, how
children who have the will to do it can lose themselves. And so this
child--alone--went out into the world, empty-handed, seeking life."

"But did she go empty-handed?" asked the tinker.

"Aye, but not empty-hearted, thank God!"

"And wherever the child went, she carried with her that hatred of
gold," mused the tinker.

"Aye; why not? She had learned how pitifully little it was worth,
when all's said and done. 'Twas her father's name she heard last on
her mother's lips, and it was their child she prayed for with her
dying breath." Patsy sprang to her feet. "Do y