"Long before, he had married a woman who cared for two things--love and gold; and he had but the one to give her. She had been a great actress, a favorite at the Comedie Francaise; but she left her work and all the applause and adulation for him, an expatriated Irishman with naught but a great love, because she thought she cared for love more. They had been wonderfully happy at first; he wrote beautiful verses about her--and his beloved motherland, and she said them for him in that wonderful singing voice of hers that had made her the idol of half of France. And she had made a game of their poverty in the wee white cottage with the roses--until her child was born and poverty could no longer be played at. Then work became drudgery, and love naught. The woman went back to her theater--and another man, a man who had gold a-plenty. And the child grew up playing alone beside the silent, grim Irishman. "Then one day the child played with no one by to watch her; the man had walked over the cliff and forgot ever to come back. Aye, and the child played on till dark came and she fell asleep--there on the door-sill, under the roses. 'Twas a neighbor, passing, that found her, and carried her home to put to bed with her own children. After that the child was taken away to a convent, and the rich children called her '_la pauvre petite_,' shared their saints'-days' gifts with her, and bought her candles that she might make a _novena_ to bring her father back again. But 'twas her mother it brought instead." Patsy stopped again to listen to the veery; he was not singing alone now, and she smiled wistfully. "See! he's found a friend, a comrade to sing with him. That's grand!" Then she went back to the story: "The child was taken from the convent in the night and by somber-clad servants who seemed in a great hurry. She was brought a long way to a chateau, one of the oldest and most beautiful in the south of France; and a small, shrivel-faced man in royal clothes met her at the door and carried her up great marble stairs to a chamber lighted by two tall candles, just. They stopped on the threshold for a breath, and the child saw that a woman was lying in the canopied bed--a very, very beautiful woman. To the child she seemed some goddess--or saint. "'Here is the child,' said the man; and the woman answered: 'Alone, Rene. Remember you promised--alone.' "After that the man left them together--the dying woman and her child. Ah!--how can I be telling you the way she fondled and caressed her! How starved were the lips that touched the child's hair, cheeks, and eyelids! And when her strength failed she drew the child into her tired arms and whispered fragments of prayers, haunting memories, pitiful regrets. Of all the things she said the child remembered but one: 'Gold buys plenty for the body, but nothing for the heart--nothing--nothing!'