r was full of the ashes of grass and reeds, ragged
urchins were lugging home sticks of cordwood, and when a bit of coal
fell from a cart in front of Kookoo's old house, a child was boxed half
across the street and robbed of the booty by a _blanchisseuse de fin_
from over the way.

The old man came home quite steady. He mounted the stairs smartly
without stopping to rest, went with a step unusually light and quiet to
his chamber and sat by the window opening upon the rusty balcony.

It was a small room, sadly changed from what it had been in old times;
but then so was 'Sieur George. Close and dark it was, the walls stained
with dampness and the ceiling full of bald places that showed the
lathing. The furniture was cheap and meagre, including conspicuously the
small, curious-looking hair-trunk. The floor was of wide slabs fastened
down with spikes, and sloping up and down in one or two broad
undulations, as if they had drifted far enough down the current of time
to feel the tide-swell.

However, the floor was clean, the bed well made, the cypress table in
place, and the musty smell of the walls partly neutralized by a geranium
on the window-sill.

He so coming in and sitting down, an unseen person called from the room
adjoining (of which, also, he was still the rentee), to know if he were
he, and being answered in the affirmative, said, "Papa George guess who
was here to-day?"

"Kookoo, for the rent?"

"Yes, but he will not come back."

"No? why not?"

"Because you will not pay him."

"No? and why not?"

"Because I have paid him."

"Impossible! where did you get the money?"

"Cannot guess?--Mother Nativity."

"What, not for embroidery?"

"No? and why not? _Mais oui!_"--saying which, and with a pleasant laugh,
the speaker entered the room. She was a girl of sixteen or thereabout,
very beautiful, with very black hair and eyes. A face and form more
entirely out of place you could not have found in the whole city. She
sat herself at his feet, and, with her interlocked hands upon his knee,
and her face, full of childish innocence mingled with womanly wisdom,
turned to his, appeared for a time to take principal part in a
conversation which, of course, could not be overheard in the corridor
outside.

Whatever was said, she presently rose, he opened his arms, and she sat
on his knee and kissed him. This done, there was a silence, both smiling
pensively and gazing out over the rotten balcony into the street. A