and worn the honors of the highest offices of the State.  She knew all this; but she knew also that this was long ago, and that her father was the last of his name in America, and when he died, after a wasting illness that exhausted his fortune, there was little thought given to the fact that the old Huguenot root still existed in France, though half-playful, half-serious mention had now and then been made of the kinsfolk in France they would sometime go to seek.

All this Esther had stored away in her memory, so that when Monsieur Baudouin announced himself as the kinsman from France, it was more like a long-anticipated event than a surprise.  And all this she told to Laura in the days that followed,—­those dear, delightful days, when there was no difficulty put in the way of going to McVane Street; when McVane Street, indeed, according to Kitty, became quite the fashion with the artists flocking to see the wonderful etching, and Monsieur Baudouin holding forth upon its merits to them as he made himself at home with his American kinsfolk, who were now discovered to be such charming folk.  Laura sometimes in these days blazed up with indignation and disgust as she noted the sudden attentions that were bestowed upon Esther and her mother.  No one now spoke of emigrants and foreigners in connection with these dwellers on McVane Street.  Jack Brooks himself seemed to forget that David Wybern looked like a Jew, even before it was found that David and all of his people were of the most unmixed Puritan stock!

“And I, too,” thought Laura,—­“I, too, muddled and mistook things as I shouldn’t, if Esther and her mother had lived in a different quarter.  If they had lived anywhere over the hill, should I have fancied, though they were so poor, that Mrs. Bowdoin must have been a professional model?  No, no, I should have thought at once, what I know now, that the artist was her friend, and that she sat to him as a friendly favor, like any other lady.”

But while Laura thus scourged herself with the rest, Esther and her mother had set her apart from all the rest for their special love and confidence,—­a love and confidence that are as fresh to-day as when the mother and daughter sailed away with Monsieur Baudouin, a year ago, to visit their French kinsfolk.

BECKY.

CHAPTER I.

“Number five!” called out shrilly and impatiently the saleswoman at the lace counter in a great dry-goods establishment.  The call was repeated in a still more impatient tone before there was any response; then there rushed up a girl of ten or eleven, whose big black eyes looked forth fearlessly, some people said impudently, from a little peaked face, so thin and small that it seemed all eyes, and in the neighborhood where the child lived she was often nicknamed “Eyes.”

“Why didn’t you come when you were first called?” asked the saleswoman, angrily.