I was walking with long strides, P’tit-Bleu tripping at my elbow; and before her story was finished we had left the Boulevard behind us, and reached the middle of the Pont St. Michel. There, I don’t know why, we halted, and stood looking off towards Notre-Dame. The grim grey front of the Cathedral glowed softly amethystine in the afternoon sun, and the sky was infinitely deep and blue above it. One could be intensely conscious of the splendid penetrating beauty of this picture, without, somehow, giving the less attention to what P’tit-Bleu was saying. She talked swiftly, eagerly, with constantly changing, persuasive intonations, with little brief pauses, hesitations, with many gestures, with much play of eyes and face. When she had done, I waited a moment. Then, grudgingly, “Well,” I began, “if what you tell me is true——” “If it is true!” P’tit-Bleu cried, with sudden fierceness. “Do you dare to say you doubt it?” And she gazed intently, fiercely, into my eyes, challenging me, as it were, to give her the lie. Before that gaze my eyes dropped, abashed. “No—I don’t doubt it,” I faltered, “I believe you. And—and allow me to say that you are a—a damned decent little girl.” Poor P’tit-Bleu! How shall I tell you the rest of her story—the story of those long years of love and sacrifice and devotion, and of continual discouragement, disappointment, with his death at the end of them, and her disappearance? In the beginning she herself was very far from realising what she had undertaken, what had befallen her. To exercise a little friendly supervision over her neighbour’s addiction to opium, to husband his money for him, and spur him on to work—it seemed a mere incident in her life, an affair by the way. But it became her exclusive occupation, her whole life’s chief concern. Little by little, one after the other, she put aside all her former interests, thoughts, associations, dropped all her former engagements, to give herself as completely to caring for, guarding, guiding poor old Edward Long, as if she had been a mother, and he her helpless child. Throughout that first winter, indeed, she continued to dance at Bullier, continued to instruct her corps of pupils, and continued even occasionally, though much less frequently than of old time, to be seen at the Vachette, or to sup with a friend at the Gambrinus. But from day to day Monsieur Edouard (he had soon ceased to be Monsieur Long, and become Monsieur Edouard) absorbed more and more of her time and attention; and when the spring came she suddenly burned her ships.