sight; so he brought her through all the little ills and around all the sharp corners of baby-life and childhood, without a human hand to help him, until one evening, having persistently shut his eyes to it for weeks and months, like one trying to sleep in the sunshine, he awoke to the realization that she was a woman.  It was a smoky one in November, the first cool day of autumn.  The sunset was dimmed by the smoke of burning prairies, the air was full of the ashes of grass and reeds, ragged urchins were lugging home sticks of cordwood, and when a bit of coal fell from a cart in front of Kookoo’s old house, a child was boxed half across the street and robbed of the booty by a blanchisseuse de fin from over the way.

The old man came home quite steady.  He mounted the stairs smartly without stopping to rest, went with a step unusually light and quiet to his chamber and sat by the window opening upon the rusty balcony.

It was a small room, sadly changed from what it had been in old times; but then so was ’Sieur George.  Close and dark it was, the walls stained with dampness and the ceiling full of bald places that showed the lathing.  The furniture was cheap and meagre, including conspicuously the small, curious-looking hair-trunk.  The floor was of wide slabs fastened down with spikes, and sloping up and down in one or two broad undulations, as if they had drifted far enough down the current of time to feel the tide-swell.

However, the floor was clean, the bed well made, the cypress table in place, and the musty smell of the walls partly neutralized by a geranium on the window-sill.

He so coming in and sitting down, an unseen person called from the room adjoining (of which, also, he was still the rentee), to know if he were he, and being answered in the affirmative, said, “Papa George guess who was here to-day?”

“Kookoo, for the rent?”

“Yes, but he will not come back.”

“No? why not?”

“Because you will not pay him.”

“No? and why not?”

“Because I have paid him.”

“Impossible! where did you get the money?”

“Cannot guess?—­Mother Nativity.”

“What, not for embroidery?”

“No? and why not? Mais oui!”—­saying which, and with a pleasant laugh, the speaker entered the room.  She was a girl of sixteen or thereabout, very beautiful, with very black hair and eyes.  A face and form more entirely out of place you could not have found in the whole city.  She sat herself at his feet, and, with her interlocked hands upon his knee, and her face, full of childish innocence mingled with womanly wisdom, turned to his, appeared for a time to take principal part in a conversation which, of course, could not be overheard in the corridor outside.

Whatever was said, she presently rose, he opened his arms, and she sat on his knee and kissed him.  This done, there was a silence, both smiling pensively and gazing out over the rotten balcony into the street.  After a while she started up, saying something about the change of weather, and, slipping away, thrust a match between the bars of the grate.  The old man turned about to the fire, and she from her little room brought a low sewing-chair and sat beside him, laying her head on his knee, and he stroking her brow with his brown palm.