“Yes, a long time—ever since we were little girls—though it seems but yesterday since she climbed the narrow, winding stairs up to that low room, where I staid all day long with no company but the cat, and nothing besides my playthings to amuse me, except to look down into the narrow street below, the Rue St. Honore, and watch the carts, and carriages, and people as they passed, and wonder when mother would come home, and if she would bring me, as she sometimes did, a bon-bon, or a white, tender _croissant_, which I liked so much better for my supper than our dark, sour bread.” “Yes,” Mr. Beresford said, leaning forward and listening eagerly to what Margery was telling him of her early life, and wondering a little that she should be so communicative. “Most girls would try to conceal the fact that they had once known such poverty,” he thought, but he did not know Margery La Rue, or guess that it was in part her pride which made her talk as she was talking. She was naturally reserved and reticent with regard to herself, but to him, whose value of birth, and blood, and family connections she rightly guessed, she would speak openly, and show him that it was something more than a mere dressmaker—a sewing-woman—whom he was honoring with his society, and in whom he was interested in spite of himself. She divined that readily, by the kindling of his eyes when they met hers as she talked, and by some of those subtle influences by which a woman knows that the man she is talking with is entertained and pleased with herself as well as with what she is saying. So, when he said to her, with a kind of pity in his tone, “And you were so desolate as that when Reinette found you?” she answered: “Yes, more desolate than you can guess—you who have never known what poverty means in a large city like Paris. But I was not unhappy, either,” she added, quickly. “I had too much love and petting from my mother for that. I was only lonely in her absence; for she worked at a hair-dresser’s and was gone all day, and I kept the house and got the meals for father till he died.” “Your father—yes,” Mr. Beresford repeated. “What was he, what did he do, and when did he die?” He seemed very eager in his questionings, and mistaking his meaning altogether, Margery’s cheeks flushed, but her voice was steady and clear as she replied: