you would do very nicely after you had had some
sleep and some soup, and I'm to sleep next to
you; and, upon my word, here comes Annette
with the soup, and it's as nasty as ever, I do
declare!"

The plateful of soup which a bony female
servant, with a tall white cap, and a yellow silk
kerchief crossed over her breast, brought to
the bedside, was certainly not nice. It was very
hot, and thick, but it had a sour smell.

"Beans, cabbages, and tallow," remarked Miss
Maryygold, in contemptuous disparagement of the
potage. "That's what we're fed upon at the
Pension Marcassin, with cold boiled horse and
vinegar-and-water to make up. You'd better eat
it. Not eating your soup is called rebellion here.
Madame says that Atheists and Voltaireans alone
refuse to eat their soup. What, can't you eat it?
Well it must be swallowed, somehow, and to
keep things quiet and comfortable, I'll eat it
myself."

The which she presently proceeded to do,
swallowing the nauseous compound in great
gulps: not assuredly through greediness, for she
made many wry faces as she ate, but apparently
fearful lest some emissary of authority should
discover her in the act. Annette, the gaunt
servant, looked on in silence, and seemingly not
in disapproval. She was not the cook, and she
knew how very nasty the soup was. Nay, when
Miss Marygold had carefully scraped up the last
spoonful, and returned the plate to her, Annette
produced from the pocket of her capacious apron
two slices of bread, pressed close together upon
an intermediate layer of plum jam. This dulcet
sandwich, she expressed by signs, was to be eaten
by Lily, and, indeed, the child needed but little
persuasion, for, though her gorge rose at the soup,
she was half famished with hunger.

"Annette's a good sort," went on Miss Marygold,
when the gaunt servant, with a grin of
satisfaction at Lily's returning appetite, had
departed, "and never tells tales. We should be
half starved if it wasn't for the bread-and-jam,
for not half of us can eat the nasty messes they
serve up in the refectory. I think the girls who
have got money pay her to bring 'em nice things,
and then she's a kind-hearted soul, and gives
away out of her profits to the poor ones and the
little ones."

Lily said that it was very kind of Annette, and
emboldened by the kind merry face of her
companion, ventured to ask if it would soon be
tea-time?

"Tea-time!" echoed Miss Marygold. "Bless you
my pet. You'll never see any tea here. Why only
princesses and duchesses drink tea in Paris.
Ma'mselle Marcassin has tea once a month,
when the Abbé Prudhomme comes to catechise
the girls, and prepare them for their communion.
Are you a Catholic, dear? I'm not, and Ma'mselle
Espréménil says I'm a heretic, and Ma'mselle Glaçon
says that outside the pale of the Church there is no
salvation, and the girls tease my life out, because I
don't cross myself and don't believe in purgatory; and
when madame has tea, Annette says she makes it
with boiling orange-flower wafer, and puts rum
into it, and honey, and barley-sugar, and chocolate
drops, and all kinds of nasty things. Tea!
You'd better forget all all about tea. We have hot
milk and bread in the morning at eight, and
vegetables, cheese, and wine (that's the vinegar-
and-water I mean), at twelve; that's called breakfast
number two; and at five o'clock—it's just
half-past now, and the clock was striking when
Annette brought you the soup—we have that
horrible stuff you couldn't eat, or another soup
that's worse, and some meat that's either half
raw or half burnt, and potatoes messed up in all
kinds of funny ways, and some salad that's never
fresh, and that's all till the next morning. Tea!
Not if Madame knows it."

Miss Marygold paused again for respiration.
Her lungs replenished with a fresh supply of
oxygen, she informed Lily (who lay very quietly
in her bed, soothed though fatigued, and with
a smiling face upturned towards her companion)
that her name was Mary Marygold, for shortness
called Polly; but that the diminutive in question
was only made use of in England, and that here
Mary Marygold being considered tautological,
and there being many Marie-Jeannes, Marie-
Claudes, Marie-Françoises, and Marie-Louises
in the school, she was customarily addressed as
Mary-Gold, as though the one-half were her
Christian name, and the other her patronymic.

"And a poor neglected Marygold I am," she
continued, shaking her wavy hair. "My father
was a rich man. He had a beautiful large book-
seller's shop at Exeter, down in Devonshire, you
know; but he failed in business. He was what
you call bankrupt, though he paid fourteen-and-
sixpence in the pound. And then we came over
here: I and pa, and my little brother Joey. And
Joey died in the cholera year, ever so long ago.
And he's buried in the Fosse Commune, the poor
people's grave at the Montmartre Cemetery.

"All pa's money was gone," she went on,
wiping her eyes. "He got work as a printer in
the office where they print the English
newspaper—Galignani's Messenger they call it. But
he couldn't keep it, through his eyesight being
so bad. And now he's a kind of parish clerk
to an English chapel in the Champs Elysées,
where you and I will go on Sundays, my darling;
and he picks up a little by interpreting, and
showing the museums and places to English
travellers stopping at the hotels. Poor dear pa,
he has a hard job to get along! He placed me
here at school as an articled pupil at three
hundred francs a year, and it's as much as
ever he can do to pay it; but I learn as much
as ever I can, and I've been here two years and
a half, and when my time's out, which will be in
another eighteen months, I shall get a situation
as a governess and help pa, and we shall be happy
and comfortable. Dear old pa! I don't
tell him how badly I'm treated here, for it would
make him fret, and he'd quarrel with Madame,