“I will lend you magazines with pleasure,” volunteered this kind stranger. “Shall you be on the front to-morrow?” “Yes, miss, at eleven, and if you can spare me something lively--I love murders--I’ll be obliged to you. I am a bit lonely now; a nurse, my friend, went yesterday. The family’s gone over to Boulogne, and I don’t have any talk with them boarding-house servants--they’re no class; I won’t deny that I’m sociable, but I’m suspicious of strangers, and as to who I know.” “Of course,” assented Letty, “so am I--especially as I am here by myself.” “Oh, indeed!” with a quick inquisitive glance, and then this pretty nameless young lady proceeded to inform her, that she was waiting to be joined by a relative, with whom she was going on the Continent; for, as she sat beside this unsuspicious woman, Letty had made up her mind to run away with the child! and was already maturing her plans. Presently Cara awoke. She was a beautiful little girl of four, and as she opened her eyes, and stared up at the face bending over her, to that lady’s horror, and yet also to her joy, she ejaculated “Ma-ma!” Her mother felt inclined to burst into tears, but struggled to subdue her feelings, which found relief in a wild, hysterical laugh. “Aye, she takes you for her mamma,” explained the nurse. “Every nice-looking, fair young lady, is ‘_mamma_.’ The poor little thing has no mother,” she added in a low aside. “Could you believe that any woman with a heart in her body, could desert _that_?” ‘That’ was still drowsy, and, lulled by the soft air and the distant band, had once more closed her forget-me-not blue eyes, and fallen asleep. Letty realised that her self-control was slipping from her altogether, and with a hurried excuse of ‘letters,’ rose, and returned to her hotel. Each morning and afternoon, she sought out the ruddy-faced, brown-eyed nurse, with the smart white perambulator, and her efforts to ingratiate herself with an uneducated, chattering, kind-hearted woman, were almost those of a timid lover, seeking to propitiate his mistress. She was compelled to listen with averted face, whilst Smithson volubly related to her her own history--as reported and edited in the servants’ hall. “The child is like her mother, they do say; anyway, in face. I never saw her--I’m a new-comer. _He_ is very ordinary: an ugly blue-and-red sort of colour, and twenty years older than his wife. She was just a slip of a schoolgirl, and by all accounts it was not so much her fault--left alone for months in that great lonely barrack of a place. They say the day after she ran off, she repented and came back, and he just threw her out! No one knows the rights of the story,--or where she is now.” Naturally these confidences were agonising to the shrinking listener, who stared out on the shining sea, and faint French coast-line, with a rigid profile; or bent down her head, to finger the flounces of Cara’s doll.