s, besides, were so kind and
merry that no little girl could long have been strange with them. She
ran about the garden in the greatest delight; her new friends showed
her all their favourite nooks, and allowed her to make a bouquet of the
flowers she liked best; and when they were tired of standing about they
all sat down together on a bank, and Charlotte told to the young ladies
the story of her short life. It was a sad little story; her father had
died when she was very young, and her mother, whose health had never
been good after the shock of his death, had gone to Italy with the aunt
who had brought her up, in hopes of growing stronger. But through two or
three years of sometimes seeming better and sometimes worse, she had
really been steadily failing, and at last she died, leaving her poor
little girl almost alone, 'for the old aunt was now,' said Charlotte,
'always ill, and not ill as mamma used to be,' she added, for however
tired _she_ was, she always liked her little girl to be beside her, and
never wearied of listening to all she had to say.

"'But now,' said the child, 'I am always alone, and it is _so_ sad. And
I have watched you so often from the balcony, and wished I might come
down to you. And now, if you will let me come to see you every day, I
shall be _so_ happy.'

"She was a dear little girl, so sweet, and simple, and loving. She
quite gained our young ladies' hearts with her pretty ways and her funny
little English, accent. They kissed her on both cheeks, and told her
they would be very pleased for her to come to them in the garden
whenever she saw them from the balcony, as she was so sure her aunt
would not object to it. They could not invite her to the house, they
explained, unless their mother and her aunt had made acquaintance. Of
course it would not have done, as little Charlotte quite understood; for
in those days," Dudu observed in passing, "politeness and ceremony were
much more observed than is at present, I am sorry to say, the case.

"The little English girl, however," he went on, "was only too delighted
to have received permission to visit them in their garden. And not many
days passed on which she did not join them there. It was a lovely summer
that year--I remember it so well. Never now does the sun seem to me to
shine quite so brightly as in those days. Perhaps it is that I am
growing old, perhaps the sad days that soon after followed left a cloud
on my memory and a mist on my spiri