syllable of her sore distress. On the contrary, she was coy and wary,
affected great reluctance to part with her pet, invented a great offer
made for him by a director of a circus, and finally let fall a hint that
less than a thousand francs she could never take for poor Moufflou.

The gentleman assented with so much willingness to the price that she
instantly regretted not having asked double. He told her that if she
would take the poodle that afternoon to his hotel the money should be
paid to her; so she despatched her children after their noonday meal in
various directions, and herself took Moufflou to his doom. She could not
believe her senses when ten hundred-franc notes were put into her hand.
She scrawled her signature, Rosina Calabucci, to a formal receipt, and
went away, leaving Moufflou in his new owner's rooms, and hearing his
howls and moans pursue her all the way down the staircase and out into
the air.

She was not easy at what she had done.

"It seemed," she said to herself, "like selling a Christian."

But then to keep her eldest son at home,--what a joy that was! On the
whole, she cried so and laughed so as she went down the Lung' Arno that
once or twice people looked at her, thinking her out of her senses, and
a guard spoke to her angrily.

Meanwhile, Lolo was sick and delirious with grief. Twenty times he got
out of his bed and screamed to be allowed to go with Moufflou, and
twenty times his mother and his brothers put him back again and held him
down and tried in vain to quiet him.

The child was beside himself with misery. "Moufflou! Moufflou!" he
sobbed at every moment; and by night he was in a raging fever, and when
his mother, frightened, ran in and called in the doctor of the quarter,
that worthy shook his head and said something as to a shock of the
nervous system, and muttered a long word,--"meningitis."

Lolo took a hatred to the sight of Tasso, and thrust him away, and his
mother too.

"It is for you Moufflou is sold," he said, with his little teeth and
hands tight clinched.

After a day or two Tasso felt as if he could not bear his life, and went
down to the hotel to see if the foreign gentleman would allow him to
have Moufflou back for half an hour to quiet his little brother by a
sight of him. But at the hotel he was told that the _Milord Inglese_ who
had bought the dog of Rosina Calabucci had gone that same night of the
purchase to Rome, to Naples, to Palermo, _chi sa_?

"An