Fleur-de-lis's cradle had curtains made of a bit of tricolour, and from the centre of the canopy there hung a medal of the Virgin swinging on a narrow ribbon of blue. The cradle itself was a wooden box, and Marie, with a maternal ingenuity that surmounted the lack of ordinary materials, had lined the inside of the hood with tissue-paper flowers; white and blue fleurs-de-lis to match those on the faded satin coverlet, a fragment of ancient grandeur where the Rastignac coat-of-arms was intertwined with the Bourbon lilies of France. And when the baby's vagrant gaze wandered to the flowery heaven above her head, and her pink fingers reached to touch it and to stroke the soft counterpane, Maman Marie would tell her the name of the posies; and so after a time, when she discovered that people and things possessed names, Marie Hortense Amélie, Mademoiselle Bébé, elected to call herself Fleur-de-lis. It was the first word she lisped, and she attached it to herself with the utmost complacency. It was appropriate enough, for she looked as if she might have been originally intended for a flower, and then somehow a soul had strayed into the flower, and it had fluttered down to earth as a child--a curious blossom to come from lowly stock, a kind of tender and beautiful miracle wrought out of common clay by the fashioning and refining power of love. At times, when Marie sat at her work and looked at Fleur-de-lis cooing and smiling under her tri-coloured curtains, she forgot the strange land outside the windows, and the Babel of strange tongues in the crowded tenement, and as her deft, brown fingers shaped the tissue flowers, she saw in fancy the poppies and the wheat and the lilies of her native Breton fields. She saw the sun shining on the old château, her mother hanging a chaplet on the baron's tomb in the little oratory, the aged baroness walking sadly in the pleasance. All, all were gone. The château was dismantled. The proud old family, rooted for centuries to the soil of Brittany, had gradually lost its land and its riches, till now there was only one frail old dame, poor and childless, to maintain the ancient title. All these memories, half sad, half sweet, flitted in and out of Marie's mind as she snipped and trimmed and twisted and shaped, her head on one side to view the result, like a little brown pheasant regarding a berry; and if Fleur-de-lis slept, she hummed a Breton lullaby as she twined her paper nosegays. What wonder, then, that there was a French air about them that attracted purchasers? [Illustration]