Blanche’s tirade, wondered if all the English were like that. She thought of her father’s books, and decided that life in France must have changed him somehow. Then she called to mind with a shiver the solemn light-blue eyes of the little girls. England must be a cold sort of a place where nobody ever laughed; perhaps that was why her father had come away. Sylvia decided to remain in France, always in a caravan if possible, where no English miss could poke about with bony fingers in one’s bread and butter.

Sylvia acquired a good deal of worldly wisdom from being so continuously in the society of Blanche, and for a child of eleven she was growing up somewhat rapidly. Yet it would have been hard to say that the influence of her noisy friend was hurtful, for it never roused in Sylvia a single morbid thought. Life in those days presented itself to her mostly as an amusing game, a game that sometimes caused tears, but tears that were easily dried, because, after all, it was only a game. Such was the situation created on one occasion by the unexpected arrival of Blanche’s fiancé from his regiment, the 717th of the line.

The company was playing at St.-Nazaire at the time, and Louis Moreau telegraphed from Nantes that he had been granted a congé of forty-eight hours.

“Mince, alors!” cried Blanche to Sylvia. “And, you know, I don’t want to give him up, because he has thirty thousand francs and he loves me à la folie. We are only waiting till he has finished his military service to get married. But I don’t want him here. First of all, I have a very chic lover, who has a poignon fou and doesn’t care how much he spends, and then the lover of my heart is here.”

Sylvia protested that she had heard the last claim too often.

“No, but this is something much greater than a béguin. It is real love. Il est très trr-ès-beau garçon, tu sais. And, chose très-drôle, he also is doing his military service here. Tout ça ne se dessine pas du tout bien, tu sais, mais pas du tout, tu comprends! Moi, je ne suis pas veineuse. Ah, non, alors, c’est le comble!”

Blanche had been sufficiently agile to extract the usual wagonette and pair of horses from the chic lover to whom she had introduced her real lover, a tall cuirassier with fierce mustaches, as her brother; but the imminent arrival of Louis was going to spoil all this, because Louis knew well that she did not possess a relative in the world, in fact, as Blanche emphasized, her solitary position had been one of her charms.

“You’ll have to get rid of Monsieur Beaujour.” This was the rich lover.

“And lose my horses? Ah, non, alors!”

“Well, then you’ll have to tell Marcel he mustn’t come near you until Louis has gone.”

“And see him go off with that Jeanne at the Clair de la Lune Concert!”

“Couldn’t Louis pay for the horses?” suggested Sylvia.

“I’m not going to let him waste his money like that; besides, he’ll only be here two nights. C’est assommant, tu sais,” Blanche sighed.

In the middle of the discussion Louis arrived, a very short little sous-officier with kind watery eyes and a mustache that could only be seen properly out of doors. Louis had not had more than five minutes with his fiancée before M. Beaujour drove up with the wagonette and pair. He was the son of a rich shipping agent in St.-Nazaire, with a stiff manner that he mistook for evidence of aristocratic descent, and bad teeth that prevented him from smiling more than he could help.

“I shall tell him you’re my brother,” said Blanche, quickly. Louis began to protest.

“Pas de boniment,” Blanche went on. “I must be pleasant to strangers in front. Madame Bassompierre insists on that, and you know I’ve never given you any cause to be really jealous.”

M. Beaujour looked very much surprised when Blanche presented Louis to him as her brother; Sylvia, remembering the tall cuirassier with the fierce mustaches that had also been introduced as Blanche’s brother, appreciated his sensations. However, he accepted the relationship and invited Louis to accompany them on the drive, putting him with Sylvia and seating himself next Blanche on the box; Louis, who found Sylvia sympathetic, talked all the time about the wonderful qualities of Blanche, continually turning round to adore her shapely back.

M. Beaujour invited Louis to a supper he was giving that evening in honor of Blanche, and supposed, perhaps a little maliciously, that Monsieur would be glad to meet his brother again, who was also to be of the party. Louis looked at Blanche in perplexity; she frowned at him and said nothing.

That supper, to which M. and Mme. Perron with several other members of the company were invited, was a very restless meal. First, Blanche would go out with the host while Marcel and Louis glared alternately at each other and the door; then she would withdraw with Louis, while M. Beaujour and Marcel glared and fidgeted; finally she would disappear with Marcel, once for such a long time that Sylvia grew nervous and went outside to find her. Blanche was in tears; Marcel was stalking up and down the passage, twisting his fierce mustaches and muttering his annoyance. Sylvia was involved in a bitter discussion about the various degrees of Blanche’s love, and in the end Blanche cried that her whole life had been shattered, and rushed back to the supper-room. Sylvia took this opportunity of representing Blanche’s point of view to Marcel, and so successful was she with her tale of the emotional stress caused by the conflict of love with prudence that finally Marcel burst into tears, called down benedictions upon Sylvia’s youthful head, and rejoined the supper-party, where he drank a great quantity of red wine and squeezed Blanche’s hand under the table for the rest of the evening.

Sylvia, having been successful once, now invited Louis to accompany her outside. To him she explained that Marcel loved Blanche madly, that she, the owner, as Louis knew, of a melting heart, had been much upset by her inability to return his love, and that Louis must not be jealous, because Blanche loved only him. Louis’s eyes became more watery than ever, and he took his seat at table again, a happy man until he drank too much wine and had to retire permanently from the feast. Finally Sylvia tackled M. Beaujour, and, recognizing that he was probably tired of lies, told him the truth of the situation, leaving it to him as an homme supérieur to realize that he could only be an episode in Blanche’s life and begging him not to force his position that night. M. Beaujour could not help being flattered by this child’s perception of his superiority, and for the rest of the entertainment played the host in a manner that was, as Madame Perron said, très très-correcte.

However, amusing evenings like this came to an end for Sylvia when once more the caravan returned to Lille. Her uncle and aunt had so much enjoyed her company that they proposed to Madame Snow to adopt Sylvia as their own daughter. Sylvia, much as she loved her mother, would have been very glad to leave the house at Lille, for it seemed, when she saw it again, poverty-stricken and pinched. There was only Valentine now left of her sisters, and her mother looked very care-worn. Her father, however, declined most positively to listen to the Bassompierres’ proposal, and was indeed almost insulting about it. Madame Snow wearily bade Sylvia say no more, and the caravan went on its way again. Sylvia wondered whether life in Lille had always been as dull in reality as this, or if it were dull merely in contrast with the gay life of vagrancy. Everybody in Lille seemed to be quarreling. Her mother was always reproaching Valentine for being late, and her father for losing money, and herself for idleness in the house. She tried to make