“I like much better to stay here, in this heavenly quiet, by the fire with you,” continued the child, “than down there in all the uproar. You are so beautiful that I love to look at you-you are like the Blessed Virgin that I have seen shining above the altar. Only from afar though, for they always chase me out of the churches with the dogs, because I am so shabby and forlorn. How white your hand is! Mine looks like a monkey’s paw beside it—and your hair is as fine and soft as silk, while mine is all rough and tangled. Oh! I am so horribly ugly—you must think so too.” “No, my dear child,” Isabelle replied, touched by her naive expressions of affection and admiration, “I do not think so. You have beauty too—you only need to make yourself neat and clean to be as pretty a little girl as one would wish to see.” “Do you really think so? Are you telling me true? I would steal fine clothes if they would make me pretty, for then Agostino would love me.” This idea brought a little flush of colour to her thin brown cheeks, and for a few minutes she seemed lost in a pleasant reverie. “Do you know where we are?” asked Isabelle, when Chiquita looked up at her again. “In a château that belongs to the great seignior who has so much money, and who wanted to carry you off at Poitiers. I had only to draw the bolt and it would have been done then. But you gave me the pearl necklace, and I love you, and I would not do anything you did not like.” “Yet you have helped to carry me off this time,” said Isabelle reproachfully. “Is it because you don’t love me any more that you have given me up to my enemies?” “Agostino ordered me, and I had to obey; besides, some other child could have played guide to the blind man as well as I, and then I could not have come into the château with you, do you see?—here I may be able to do something to help you. I am brave, active and strong, though I am so small, and quick as lightning too—and I shall not let anybody harm you.” “Is this château very far from Paris?” asked Isabelle, drawing Chiquita up on her lap. “Did you hear any one mention the name of this place?” “Yes, one of them called it—now what was it?” said the child, looking up at the ceiling and absently scratching her head, as if to stimulate her memory. “Try to remember it, my child!” said Isabelle, softly stroking Chiquita’s brown cheeks, which flushed with delight at the unwonted caress—no one had ever petted the poor child in her life before.