The Countess de Linieres leaned forward in intense sympathy conjoined with a certain weird premonition. "She isn't really my sister," went on Henriette, "but I owe her the love of a mother and sister combined. She saved us from want and death. My father found her on the steps of Notre Dame--" A low cry escaped the Countess. "--where he was about to put me as a foundling, there not being a morsel of food in our wretched home. This other baby was half buried under the snow. He warmed the little bundle against his body and mine--and, rather than let us perish there of the cold, returned homeward with both infants in his arms. Suspended from the other baby's neck were a bag of gold and this locket--" The Countess gasped. She put a hand to her heart and seemed about to faint before recovering strength to examine the locket that Henriette handed to her. It was a miniature that the Prefect's wife recognized as her own! Opened, it disclosed an aged and yellowed bit of paper, on which the writing was still visible: HER NAME IS LOUISE SAVE HER "My child! My own Louise!" she cried, "--lost, wandering and blind in Paris. Tell me, tell me--" She had almost fainted. The floodgate of tears relieved her pent heart. Henriette was bending over her now, her arm around her shoulders, trying to comfort. But the girl herself was near the breaking point. The voice of the loved and absent one seemed to sound in her ears. Was it an hallucination? "Singing,--don't you hear?" said Henriette, softly, to the Mother. The girl brushed a hand across her eyes and tapped her temple. "In my dreams oft I hear it, my sister's voice. I must be losing my reason!" Again swelled the notes of the Norman melody, and this time the Mother heard too. The two sprang to their feet. Henriette dashed to balcony window. At the end of the street she saw a figure clad in beggar's rags that she thought she knew. "LOUISE!" Henriette's cry echoed down the street and impinged on the blind beggar's brain. The outcast ran groping and stumbling forward, no longer singing, but calling "Henriette!" Her keeper, Widow Frochard, was not in sight. The blind girl came nearer. Frochard emerged from a ginshop and tried to head her off. The Mother followed Henriette to the window. The latter encouraged Louise with little cries: "Don't get excited!" "It's all right!" "Wait there!" "I'll be down in one instant!" She rushed past the Countess across the room and flung wide the door, on the very brink of happiness. But a troop of guards stood there to her astonished gaze. The Count de Linieres, standing at their head, pronounced her name as if reading a warrant: "Henrietta Girard!" The girl drew back, then charged like a little fury on the gunstocks and bosoms of the troopers, pounding them with her fists. Unable to move this granite-like wall, she dashed back to the balcony eyrie, imploring Louise with both hands.