"Yes," assented Mattina, "I am always hungry. My mistress," she added gravely, "says that I eat like a locust falling on young leaves." "Like a locust! But what a horror! It is a sign of good health to be hungry. Come then, my child, drink, and tell me if it be not excellent, my Paris chocolate?" So Mattina tasted her first cup of French chocolate, and found it surpassingly good. And the next day, and for three days after that, in the afternoons, when she might have sat down to rest on the doorstep, Mattina would lift the latch of the room in the courtyard, while "Madmazella" was out giving lessons, and sweep, and dust, and tidy, and put fresh water into the pretty vase with the flowers, and clean the trim little house shoes, and fill the spirit lamp. But on the fifth day, a carriage came to the door of the next house, and the coachman went into the ground floor room and brought out a trunk, which he lifted to the box, and "Madmazella" came out also in a dark blue dress, with a gray veil tied over her hat, and a little bag in her hand, ready to go away to her own country. Mattina stood outside on the pavement looking on, and there was a lump in her throat. "Madmazella" got into the open one-horse carriage and beckoned to her. "Come here, my little one! You have been of a goodness,--but of a goodness to me that I do not know how to thank you; I shall bring you a whole big box of chocolates from Paris when I return; and now take this very little present, and buy something as a souvenir of me! Is it not so?" She smiled and waved her hand as the carriage drove off, and only when it was quite out of sight did Mattina look at what had been pressed into her hand. It was a crumpled five drachmæ note and Mattina looked at it with awe. She wondered whether it would be enough to buy the picture with the boat, in case the New Year present should be something else. In the meanwhile where should she keep it? Suddenly she thought of the pocket Kyra Sophoula had stitched into her brown dress. She ran up to the little dark room, half way up the stairs, reached down her bundle from the nail on which it hung, pulled out a much crumpled brown dress, shook it out, found the pocket, and placed the five drachmæ note in it, pinning up the opening carefully for fear the note might fall out. V It had been agreed that Mattina should be allowed to go to see her uncle and aunt every other Sunday, in the afternoon. But it had happened lately that Sunday after Sunday her mistress had said, "I have to go out myself, a friend expects me," or, "My head aches; I cannot be troubled with the children; you can go out another day." But the "other day" never came. An older serving maid, or one who knew town ways better, would have asked for the outing on a week day; but Mattina did not know. She cried a little over her lost holiday and stayed in week after week, in the narrow street and the close rooms that always smelt of stale smoke.