chattered without ceasing, a perpetual flood of remarks, while the women laughed and admired. “What does she say?” they asked the one among them who partially justified the “_Ici on parle Anglais_,” in the shop-window. “Elle est délicieuse,” the shopwoman said; “elle est jolie comme un cœur: et d’un goût!” Janey did not understand a word, but all the same knew she was being applauded, and her little head was turned by the notice bestowed upon her. “We came without any boxes or frocks or anything, and papa is doing to let me buy whatever I like,” said Janey. The women were curious beyond description when this was rapidly reported to them by the one who understood. All this strange little scene went on while Helen, still half dazed, stammered out her orders in her faltering, imperfect French, and accepted timidly what was offered to her. The colour came to her cheeks, and a painful prick of life to her being, when she heard her little sister’s indiscreet explanation. “We left all our things behind--by mistake,” she said, trembling, a tingling, smarting blush dyeing her face. The timid falsehood redoubled her own confusion, but it did not do much more. It changed, Helen thought, the looks of the women. They followed her about, she fancied, trying to elicit further revelations from Janey, pressing every kind of outfit upon her; watching her as if---- What did they imagine? Did they think she would steal something? Helen’s heart swelled so in her simplicity that she thought it would burst. She held Janey’s hand closely in her own, and squeezed it tight. “Don’t talk so, don’t talk so,” she whispered. And then asked herself, with an indescribable pang, why should not the child talk? A grey light of knowledge, a vague, miserable twilight of consciousness, like the first lightening of a gloomy dawn, was stealing over her. When she had made her purchases--two frocks for Janey, the simplest which that little heroine could be prevailed on to accept, and a plain dark dress for herself, and a supply of underclothing,--she found her father at the door, with the box he had bought upon a cab. This was how they were provided with the luggage which is indispensable to respectability. Helen could not but look at him with different eyes, now that she felt herself a party to this fraud, which she began to be conscious of, without knowing what it meant. What did it mean? Almost involuntarily unawares had not she herself made a false statement in explanation of the extraordinary straits in which they were placed? She watched her father, and found him altered, she could scarcely tell how. His hair had changed its colour; his beard had grown miraculously in a single night. What did it mean? Her heart ached with the question, but she did not know how to reply.