Until then I believed that, whatever crimes and vices might be laid at her door, dishonesty was not to be counted among them. I even boasted of her honesty as an excuse for my keeping her, nuisance as she was. I think I should have doubted her guilt if the report of it only had reached me. But I could not doubt the testimony of my own eyes when there was discovered, carefully packed in the capacious bag she always carried, one of my best napkins, a brand-new tea-cloth, and a few kitchen knives and forks that could not have strayed there of themselves. I could see in the articles selected her tender concern for the comfort of her _petit Anglais_ and her practical wish to prepare her establishment for his coming, and probably it showed her consideration for me that she had been content with such simple preparations. But the value of the things themselves and her object in appropriating them had nothing to do with the main fact that, after all we had done and endured, she was stealing from us. "We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity," Stevenson once wrote. Clementine wiped out the one so successfully that she left me with no use for the other. I told her she must go, and this time I was in good earnest. To Clementine, however, nothing could have seemed less possible. She could not understand that a petty theft would make her less indispensable, or that I would strain at a gnat after swallowing so many camels. Within a week she was knocking at our door and expressing her willingness to resume her place in our chambers. She was not discouraged by the refusal to admit her, but a few days later, this time by letter, she again assured me that she waited to be recalled, and she referred to the desire of her _petit Anglais_ in the matter. She affected penitence, admitting that she had committed _une "Betisse"_--the spelling is hers--and adding: "_avoir agit ainsi avec des maitres aussi bons, ce n'est pas pardonable. Je vous assure que si un jour je devien riche, ou peut etre plus pauvre, que dans ma richesse, comme dans ma plus grande misere, je ne pourrais jamais oublier les bons maitres Monsieur et Madame, car jamais dans ma vie d'orpheline, je n'aie jamais rencontre d'aussi bons maitres._" She also reminded me that she lived in the hope that _Madame_ would not forget the promised present of linen and a hat. I made no answer. Another letter followed, penitence now exchanged for reproaches. She expostulated with me for taking the bread out of the mouth of her _petit innocent_--Ernest--the little innocent whom the slums had nothing more to teach. This second letter met the same fate as the first, but her resources were not exhausted. In a third she tried the dignity of sorrow: "_Ma faute m'a rendu l'ame si triste_" and, as this had no effect, she used in a fourth the one genuine argument of them all, her hunger: "_Enfin il faut que je tache d'oublier, mais en