referred to as "madame" Lamande, but this entreaty the Directrice would not grant.

"Mademoiselle," she said, "I cannot do it for you; and if you are wise, there is no need. Remember what I told you when you returned, and be guided by me this time. Do not repeat there the blunder that you made here. Leave the child where he is; you have tested the person and you know she is honest. Occasionally, once a year, you can afford to come and see him. If you take him with you, you will not gain much by your removal. Of course, at Ivry-St.-Hilaire your parentage is unknown and there is nothing to hinder you from inventing a relationship; but it isn't worth the trouble—believe me, you would be suspected just the same. Make the most of this opportunity; go unencumbered—do not live your whole life in shadow for the sake of an ideal."

But her conscience would not allow her to see him only once a year, nor to leave him to play on the doorstep, and attend the École Communale. In view of a constant salary, she already foresaw herself alleviating his plight. She was resigned to live her life in shadow, that she might yield a little sunshine to him.

So, when she had sacrificed herself again, madame la Directrice thought: "She is strangely devoted to the child. I wonder if I was wrong to befriend her—perhaps she is a bad woman, after all!"

She did not venture to take the boy with her, however. She was more than three months at Ivry before her furtive arrangements for him were concluded. Then she placed him with priests twenty miles distant from her, in the Etablissement des Frères Eudoxie at Maison-Verte. Small as the annual charges were, they were vast in relation to her salary. Till she succeeded, by slow degrees, in obtaining a few private pupils, her self-denial was severe.

But the little chap was in better hands now. And the woman had procured a respite from disdain. A tinge of colour crept back into her cheeks, and she faced the world less fearfully. By and by, when she could afford the fare, she went to the institution sometimes, on a Sunday, and walked with him in the cour, and noted that gradually his speech improved. As she could afford the fare but seldom, the intervals were long.

Paul looked forward to her rare visits. Some of the boys had visitors more frequently than he, pale women who came to walk beside them in the cour; and the boastful shout of "Ma mère!" was often humiliating to Paul. He had been taught to call her "mademoiselle," but one Sunday, the child, in a triumphant cry, found his own name for her: "Mademoiselle ma mère est venue!"

After that, he called her always "Mademoiselle ma mère"; and, divining something of the little wistful heart, mademoiselle did not reprove him.

At Ivry-St.-Hilaire a thing strange and bewildering happened. For the first time in her life a man sought her society; for the first time in her life she was happier for talking to a man. Two moments were prodigious to her—a moment after she had heard herself laughing merrily; a moment when she realised why she had just plucked out a grey hair.

When they were alone together one day the man said to her:

"Now that I have made a practice in the town at last, I am rooted here—and Ivry isn't amusing. If a woman were to marry me she would have to live here always. I tell you this because I love you."

It was as if God had wrought another miracle. "I can't understand it," she whispered truly.

Then the man laughed and took her in his arms, and it seemed to her that she had never known what it was to be tired.

When he let her go and she came back to the world, her sin was staring at her. And now the voice that decoyed her before was clamouring: "If you degrade yourself in his sight you'll lose him."

Her lover appeared to her no less a hero because, under his imposing presence, he was a cur, and the thing that she feared would revolt him was her dishonesty.

Not on that day, nor on the next, but after many resolutions to do right had melted into terrors, she forced him to listen; and it seemed to her that she was dying while she spoke.

"I stole," she moaned, her face covered.

"Pauvrette!" he exclaimed tenderly.

When she dared to look, he was smiling. The relief and gratitude in her soul were so infinite that she wanted to kneel at his feet.

But when she sobbed out the story of her later struggles and told him how she was devoting her life to the child, his brow grew dark.

"That, of course, would have to be changed," he said.

"Changed?" she stammered.

"Obviously, best beloved. One must consider public opinion. These journeys to Maison-Verte are mad; they must cease. You have not been fair to yourself; and now, more than ever, you need to reflect that——"

"But," she broke in, frightened, "you don't understand. It is not a mere question of my going to Maison-Verte; he will not be there always—he will grow up, and his future will be my care. My responsibility goes on. Oh, I know—you need not tell me—that you have thoroughly the right to refuse, but—but I have no right to alter. Since I have seen that I could never hope to give back what I took, I have seen that he was my charge for life."

"Mon Dieu!" he said, "you exaggerate quixotically. To give back what you took? Remember what you have already done!"

"Counted in francs," she pleaded, "I have done very little. It has been difficult to do, that's all."

Presently, when he perceived that, on this one point, the little weak woman was inflexible, the man made a beautiful speech, declaring that she was worth more than the opinion of Ivry-St.-Hilaire, and of all France. He said that nothing mattered to him but their "divine love." He looked more heroic still, and his eyes were moist with the nobility of the sentiments that he was delivering.

But as he sat in the principal café of the town by and by, among the stacks of swords in the corners, and the elite of the military and civil circles, clearing their throats vociferously on to the floor, he knew that a few days hence he meant to deliver a second lie about the "supplications of his family and his duty as a son." Had her debt been paid, he would have held her absolved from yielding so much as another thought to the boy, and he could have afforded to pay the debt, but it did not even enter his mind to commit such a madness. Yet, in his fashion, he loved her. The "chivalry" of offering marriage to a woman without a dot had proved it.

It would have been kinder to her not to leave her in a fool's paradise; she was to suffer more intensely because of that.

"Some of the facts, sufficient to explain the position, I have confided to my mother," he told her. "She is very old, and the honour of the family is very dear to her. I entreat you, in her name. The boy shall remain in this institution, or be placed in some other. They will teach him a trade. When the time comes for him to earn his living he will be no worse off than the other gosses there. Be guided by me. I assure you, you are morbidly sensitive. There is no reason why you should ever meet him again. My adored one, our happiness is in your hands. Give the child up!"

"I cannot," she repeated hopelessly.

And then, all of a sudden, the imposing presence vanished and she saw the puny man—more clearly than he had ever seen himself.

"It begins to be plain why you 'cannot,'" he hissed. "Zut, tell your yarn about your 'theft' to somebody greener. For me it's too thin!... But why should we part, ducky? The matter could be arranged."

When he had demonstrated his intelligence in this way, without advantage, the man went down the garden path, out of her life—and for an hour she sat sightless, and ageing years. The birds in the garden were making a cruel noise. She felt that she had grown too old during the afternoon to bear the shrillness of the birds. When was it that she had had the arrogance to pull out a grey hair?

Her love-story