because it is always aggressive and narrow."

She had taken a strong feminine dislike to Madame la Mère.

"She makes her family miserable," she said. "She drags them from place to place. Possibly there is a lover,—more possibly than not. The girl's eyes wore a peculiar look,—as if they searched for something far away."

She had scarcely concluded her charming little harangue when we reached our destination; but, as we passed through the entrance, she paused to speak to the curly-headed child of the concierge whose mother held him by the hand.

"We shall have new arrivals to-morrow," said the good woman, who was always ready for friendly gossip. "The apartment upon the first floor," and she nodded to me significantly, and with good-natured encouragement. "Perhaps you may get pupils," she added. "They are Americans, and speak only English, and there is a young lady, Madame says."

"Americans!" exclaimed Clélie, with sudden interest.

"Americans," answered the concierge. "It was Madame who came. Mon Dieu! it was wonderful! So rich and so—so"—filling up the blank by a shrug of deep meaning.

"It cannot have been long since they were—peasants," her voice dropping into a cautious whisper.

"Why not our friends of the Louvre?" said Clélie as we went on up-stairs.

"Why not?" I replied. "It is very possible."

The next day there arrived at the house numberless trunks of large dimensions, superintended by the small angry woman and a maid. An hour later came a carriage, from whose door emerged the young lady and her father. Both looked pale and fagged; both were led up-stairs in the midst of voluble comments and commands by the mother; and both, entering the apartment, seemed swallowed up by it, as we saw and heard nothing further of them. Clélie was indignant.

"It is plain that the mother overwhelms them," she said. "A girl of that age should speak and be interested in any novelty. This one would be if she were not wretched. And the poor little husband!"—

"My dear," I remarked, "you are a feminine Bayard. You engage yourself with such ardor in everybody's wrongs."

When I returned from my afternoon's work a few days later, I found Clélie again excited. She had been summoned to the first floor by Madame.

"I went into the room," said Clélie, "and found the mother and daughter together. Mademoiselle, who stood by the fire, had evidently been weeping Madame was in an abrupt and angry mood. She wasted no words. 'I want you to give her lessons,' she said, making an ungraceful gesture in the direction of her daughter. 'What do you charge a lesson?' And on my telling her, she engaged me at once. 'It's a great deal, but I guess I can pay as well as other people,' she remarked."

A few of the lessons were given downstairs, and then Clélie preferred a request to Madame.

"If you will permit Mademoiselle to come to my room, you will confer a favor upon me," she said.

Fortunately, her request was granted, and so I used afterward to come home and find Mademoiselle Esmeralda in our little salon at work disconsolately and tremulously. She found it difficult to hold her pencil in the correct manner, and one morning she let it drop, and burst into tears.

"Don't you see I'll never do it!" she answered, miserably. "Don't you see I couldn't, even if my heart was in it, and it aint at all!"

She held out her little hands piteously for Clélie to look at. They were well enough shaped, and would have been pretty if they had not been robbed of their youthful suppleness by labor.

"I've been used to work," she said, "rough work all my life, and my hands aint like yours."

"But you must not be discouraged, Mademoiselle," said Clélie gently. "Time"—

"Time," interposed the girl, with a frightened look in her pretty gray eyes. "That's what I can't bear to think of—the time that's to come."

This was the first of many outbursts of confidence. Afterward she related to Clélie, with the greatest naïveté, the whole history of the family affairs.

They had been the possessors of some barren mountain lands in North Carolina, and her description of their former life was wonderful indeed to the ears of the Parisian. She herself had been brought up with marvelous simplicity and hardihood, barely learning to read and write, and in absolute ignorance of society. A year ago iron had been discovered upon their property, and the result had been wealth and misery for father and daughter. The mother, who had some vague fancies of the attractions of the great outside world, was ambitious and restless. Monsieur, who was a mild and accommodating person, could only give way before her stronger will.

"She always had her way with us," said Mademoiselle Esmeralda, scratching nervously upon the paper before her with her pencil, at this part of the relation. "We did not want to leave home, neither me nor father, and father said more than I ever heard him say before at one time. 'Mother,' says he, 'let me an' Esmeraldy stay at home, an' you go an' enjoy your tower. You've had more schoolin' an' you'll be more at home than we should. You're useder to city ways, havin' lived in 'Lizabethville.' But it only vexed her. People in town had been talking to her about traveling and letting me learn things, and she'd set her mind on it."

She was very simple and unsophisticated. To the memory of her former truly singular life she clung with unshaken fidelity. She recurred to it constantly. The novelty and luxury of her new existence seemed to have no attractions for her. One thing even my Clélie found incomprehensible, while she fancied she understood the rest—she did not appear to be moved to pleasure even by our beloved Paris.

"It is a true maladie du pays," Clélie remarked to me. "And that is not all."

Nor was it all. One day the whole truth was told amid a flood of tears.

"I—I was going to be married," cried the poor child. "I was to have been married the week the ore was found. I was—all ready, and mother—mother shut right down on us."

Clélie glanced at me in amazed questioning.

"It is a kind of argot which belongs only to Americans," I answered in an undertone. "The alliance was broken off."

"Ciel!" exclaimed my Clélie between her small shut teeth. "The woman is a fiend!"

She was wholly absorbed in her study of this unworldly and untaught nature. She was full of sympathy for its trials and tenderness, and for its pain.

Even the girl's peculiarities of speech were full of interest to her. She made serious and intelligent efforts to understand them, as if she studied a new language.

"It is not common argot," she said. "It has its subtleties. One continually finds somewhere an original idea—sometimes even a bon mot, which startles one by its pointedness. As you say, however, it belongs only to the Americans and their remarkable country. A French mind can only arrive at its climaxes through a grave and occasionally tedious research, which would weary most persons, but which, however, does not weary me."

The confidence of Mademoiselle Esmeralda was easily won. She became attached to us both, and particularly to Clélie. When her mother was absent or occupied, she stole up-stairs to our apartment and spent with us the moments of leisure chance afforded her. She liked our rooms, she told my wife, because they were small, and our society, because we were "clever," which we discovered afterward meant "amiable." But she was always pale and out of spirits. She would sit before our fire silent and abstracted.

"You must not mind if I don't talk," she would say. "I can't; and it seems to help me to get to sit and think about things—Mother won't let me do it down-stairs."

We became also familiar with the father. One day I met him upon the staircase, and to my amazement he stopped as if he wished to address me. I raised my hat and bade him good-morning. On his part he