The Vision bent over ostensibly to brush an imaginary speck of dust from her skirt, but in reality to conceal a smile. When she sat erect again, her face was quite demure. "So am I," she agreed. "It would have been horrible to be left at a place where I didn't know any one--of course, I don't really know you," she added, hastily, "but I've heard papa speak of you so much that you seem to be a sort of friend of the family." "I should like to be," he said, colouring at his own temerity. "Well, it isn't so difficult. We're really rather a companionable family." He gasped a little at the dazzling vista the words suggested. "I don't know what I should have done," she went on, "if I had had to sit here so long without any one to talk to or anything to read. Oh, you have a book there," she added, noticing the little book which was lying open face downward beside the key. "What is it?" "This," answered Allan, laughing and picking up the thin little volume bound in black, "is the book of rules. I'm afraid it wouldn't interest you. But I have a splendid one in my pocket." He went to his coat and got it out. "Have you ever read it?" he asked as he handed it to her. She glanced at the title. "Les Misérables," she read, making rather a botch of it. "What does that mean?" "'The miserable ones,' I think." "I don't like to read about miserable people." "Oh, they're not all miserable," he protested, taking the book eagerly, and opening it. "The old bishop, for instance, Bishop Welcome--may I read you something?" She nodded, her eyes on his glowing face. "The old bishop, you know, gave all his money to help others, went to live in the little old hospital and made them move the beds to the building which had always been the bishop's palace. He said it was all a mistake--that there should be twenty-six people crowded together in that little building, while the big one next door had only him and his sister and his housekeeper in it. He never locked his door, and came to be so loved by the people that they called him Bishop Welcome. Let me read you this chapter," and he turned to the seventh of the first book. "I don't pronounce the French names very well, but you mustn't mind." "I won't," she promised, and settled herself more comfortably in her chair. He interested her strangely--he was somehow different from the other boys she knew. They never talked to her in this way. And he began to read her the account of the bishop's meeting with that redoubtable brigand, Cravatte, a bold wretch who had organized a band of outlaws, and even robbed the cathedral at Embrun of all its gold-embroidered vestments. In the midst of the excitement, the bishop arrived, on the way to visit his parishioners in the mountains. His friends attempted to persuade him to turn back.