" 182

IT WAS A CRITICAL MOMENT " 383

MLLE. FOUCHETTE

CHAPTER I

"Get along, you little beast!"

Madame Podvin accompanied her admonition with a vigorous blow from her
heavy hand.

"Out, I say!"

Thump.

"You lazy caniche!"

Thump.

"You get no breakfast here this morning!"

Thump.

"Out with you!"

Thump.

In the mean time the unhappy object of these objurgations and blows
had been rapidly propelled towards the open door, and was with a final
thump knocked into the street.

A stray dog? Oh, no; a dog is never abused in this way in Paris. It
would probably cause a riot.

It was only a wee bit of a child,--dirty, clothed in rags, with
tangled blonde hair that had never, apparently, seen a comb, and whose
little bare feet and thin ankles were incrusted with the dried filth
of the gutters.

Being only a child, the few neighbors who were abroad at that early
hour merely grinned at her as she picked herself up and limped away
without a cry or a word.

"She's a tough one," muttered a witness.

"She's got to be mighty tough to stand the Podvin," responded another.

In the rapidly increasing distance the child seemed to justify these
remarks; for she began to step out nimbly towards the town of
Charenton without wasting time over her grievances.

"All the same, I'm hungry," she said to herself, "and the streets of
Charenton will be mighty poor picking half an hour hence."

She paused presently to examine a pile of garbage in front of a house.
But the dogs had been there before her,--there was nothing to eat
there.

These piles of garbage awaited the tour of the carts; they began to
appear at an early hour in the morning, and within an hour had been
picked over by rag-pickers, dogs, and vagrants until absolutely
nothing was left that could be by any possibility utilized by these
early investigators. Here and there two or three dogs contested the
spoils of a promising pile, to separate with watchful amity to gnaw
individual bones.

As it was a principal highway from the Porte de Charenton to the town,
the piles of refuse had been pretty thoroughly overhauled by the dogs
and human scum that infested the barrier.

Finally, the girl stopped as a stout woman appeared at a grille with a
paper of kitchen refuse which she was about to throw into the street.

They looked at each other steadily,--the child with eager, hungry
eyes; the woman wi