The cat and doll attracted Reinette quite as much as the little girl, and with the permission of her maid, she was soon climbing the steep, narrow, but perfectly clean stairway which lead to Numero 40. Mr. La Rue had been home to lunch that day, and Margery, though scarcely nine years old, was clearing away the remnants of their plain repast, and brushing up the hearth, when the door was pushed softly open, and a pair of bright, laughing eyes looking at her from under the scarlet and ermine, and a sweet bird-like voice said: “Please, Margie, may I come in? I am Reinette Hetherton—Queenie, papa calls me, and I like that best. Lisette said you lived up here all alone with only the cat. Where is she? I don’t see her.” Margery was standing before the fire, broom in hand, with a long-sleeved apron on, which came to her feet and concealed her dress entirely, while her hair was hidden in a cap she always wore at her work. At the sound of Reinette’s voice she started suddenly, and dropping her broom, gazed open-mouthed at the vision of loveliness addressing her so familiarly. The mention of the cat struck a chord of sympathy, and she replied at once: “She isn’t _she_; she’s _he_, and his name is _Jacques_. There he is, under father’s chair,” and the two girls bumped their heads together as they both stooped at the same moment to capture the cat, who was soon purring in Reinette’s lap, as she sat before the fire, with Margery on the floor beside her, admiring her bright face and beautiful dress. “I’ve nothing half so pretty as this,” Margery said, despondingly, as she touched the scarlet cloak. “My best coat is plaid, and I only wear it on Sundays.” “Oh my!” Reinette replied, with a great air of self-importance, “I have three more. One is velvet, lined with rose color, which I wear to church, and when I drive with papa in the _Bois_. Do you ever go there, or on the _Champs d’Elysees_?” “I walk there sometimes on Sundays with mother, but I was never in a real carriage in my life,” was Margery’s reply, and Reinette rejoined: “Then you shall be. I’ll make Celine—that’s my maid—take us this very afternoon. There’ll be a crowd, and it will be such fun! But why do you wear that big apron and cap?—they disfigure you so.” Margery blushed and explained that she wore them to keep her clothes clean; then, divesting herself of the obnoxious garments, she shook down her rippling hair, and stood before Reinette, who exclaimed: “How sweet you are, with that bright sunny hair and those lovely blue eyes! I wish mine were blue. I hate ’em—the nasty old things, so black and so vixenish, Celine says, when I am mad, as I am more than half the time. But tell me, do you really live here all alone with the cat?” “Oh no.” And in a few words Margery explained her mode of life, which to the pampered child of luxury seemed desolate in the extreme.