_Painting by_ Carlton A. Smith, _R.A._ _Drawings by_ Edmund J. Sullivan, _A.R.W.S._ _Copyright in the U.S.A. by the Century Company._ FLEUR-DE-LIS had been christened Marie Hortense Amélie Dupont: Marie for her mother, Hortense and Amélie in honour of the two Vicomtesses de Rastignac, sole survivors of the proud old Royalist family in whose service Marie's mother and grandmother had lived, and into whose service Marie herself had been born. But when _la petite_ Marie Hortense Amélie was a mere blossom of babyhood she forsook the name that the priest had given her as he touched her downy head with the holy water, and chose instead to be called Fleur-de-lis--a name, in sooth, much better suited to a noble daughter of the Rastignacs than to a child of Marie Dupont, maker of tissue-paper flowers, and Pierre Dupont, street musician. Fleur-de-lis had first opened her eyes in a very humble chamber, but it was large enough to hold a deal of sweet content, which grew all the sweeter when she came to share it. There were only two rooms for father, mother, and child, and these were in a dreary tenement house, for Pierre Dupont, a stranger in a strange land, was having a desperate struggle with poverty. On being discharged from the hospital, where he had passed through the dangerous illness that left him a maimed and broken man, he had to begin the world all over again, and begin it single-handed, in very truth. There were few things to which he could turn his one hand; one of them was the crank of a street-piano, and in a modest example of that modern instrument of torture he accordingly invested the last of his savings. He was much too good for it, but by regarding it distinctly as a hated object which should be discarded the moment something better appeared, he mastered his aversion, and, by wheeling it through the streets from morning till night, he managed to live, for there were always people who wanted to hear it, and others who did not, so that between the two classes he scraped together enough for his frugal needs.