derstand. Her cheeks--her skirt--you can see her legs
up to here.... Believe me or don't believe me, but she's twin pea to
your Marie. If she comes back, what shall I tell her? I won't let that
sort into my house! Eh? Kick her out?"

"Oh but, M. Etienne, I am at home to-day. Let her come up."

I closed my door blushing.

Through the banisters I recognized her. Actually Marie!

"Come in...."

She went in ahead of me to the dining-room--"my dining-room," she used
to call it--and seated herself deliberately. Genuine timidity hides
itself behind a mask of absurd audacity.

"Marie ... Marie ... is it possible?"

She was wearing a large red straw hat turned up at one side and weighted
down on the other side by a nodding mass of huge black plumes, two tall
elastic antennae, the sort worn by horses drawing hearses. Under the
chalky enamel you couldn't see her freckles, but her eyes, her lovely
eyes of purest aquamarine, with glints of indigo from her blackened
lashes, still retained their dewy look of astonishment.

Here was Marie. At last I was going to know why she was so mute and why
she ran away one evening without taking along her bundle of clothes or
her prayer-book. I was going to find out how a poor little servant girl
rebelling against kindness could become a poor little swaggering
over-dressed prostitute.

"I have come for my things."

"They are still here, Marie; I'll go and get them."

But I couldn't budge. This phenomenon coming so close to me was
appalling. I looked at her. She had the soft, awkward charm of a little
astonished beast. Seated there in my presence she made an ingenuous,
piteous sight, like a ladybird you're afraid of crushing, or a wilful
timid lamb withdrawing from your caress.

I noticed all sorts of minutiae--that she carried a cloth hand-bag, an
exact copy of a bag of mine, and tied her shoe-latchets the very same
way I did mine; was very neat, her shoes polished, her hands clean, her
neck fairly waxed with soap. Her gaze, once aimless and imprisoned,
harpooned the things in my room and withdrew freighted with
discoveries.... And she gave me acid, persistent looks like the looks
one woman gives another. "Has she aged?" her looks questioned, "has she
changed, is she prettier?" Her eyes roved around the room. "Ah, that
little etagere was not there in my time, nor that engraving.... Who's
doing her work? The place looks well kept." She parted the collar of her
jacket at the opening t