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She was perfectly unembarrassed and unaffected. We fell as easily into talk as if we had been friends instead of strangers.

I asked how it was that she had no companion to take care of her. “You are too young and too pretty,” I said in my blunt English way, “to trust yourself alone in such a place as this.”

She took no notice of the compliment. She calmly put it away from her as if it had not reached her ears.

“I have no friend to take care of me,” she said simply. “I was sad and sorry this evening, all by myself, and I thought I would go to the Gardens and hear the music, just to amuse me. It is not much to pay at the gate; only a shilling.”

“No friend to take care of you?” I repeated. “Surely there must be one happy man who might have been here with you to-night?”

“What man do you mean?” she asked.

“The man,” I answered thoughtlessly, “whom we call, in England, a Sweetheart.”

I would have given worlds to have recalled those foolish words the moment they passed my lips. I felt that I had taken a vulgar liberty with her. Her face saddened; her eyes dropped to the ground. I begged her pardon.

“There is no need to beg my pardon,” she said. “If you wish to know, sir–yes, I had once a sweetheart, as you call it in England. He has gone away and left me. No more of him, if you please. I am rested now. I will thank you again, and go home.”

She rose to leave me.

I was determined not to part with her in that way. I begged to be allowed to see her safely back to her own door. She hesitated. I took a man’s unfair advantage of her, by appealing to her fears. I said, “Suppose the blackguard who annoyed you should be waiting outside the gates?” That decided her. She took my arm. We went away together by the bank of the Thames, in the balmy summer night.

A walk of half an hour brought us to the house in which she lodged–a shabby little house in a by-street, inhabited evidently by very poor people.

She held out her hand at the door, and wished me good-night. I was too much interested in her to consent to leave my little foreign lady without the hope of seeing her again. I asked permission to call on her the next day. We were standing under the light of the street-lamp. She studied my face with a grave and steady attention before she made any reply.

“Yes,” she said at last. “I think I do know a gentleman when I see him. You may come, sir, if you please, and call upon me to-morrow.”

So we parted. So I entered–doubting nothing, foreboding nothing–on a scene in my life which I now look back on with unfeigned repentance and regret.

III.

I AM speaking at this later time in the position of a clergyman, and in the character of a man of mature age. Remember that; and you will understand why I pass as rapidly as possible over the events of the next year of my life–why I say as little as I can of the errors and the delusions of my youth.

I called on her the next day. I repeated my visits during the days and weeks that followed, until the shabby little house in the by-street had become a second and (I say it with shame and self-reproach) a dearer home to me.

All of herself and her story which she thought fit to confide to me under these circumstances may be repeated to you in few words.

The name by which letters were addressed to her was “Mademoiselle Jeromette.” Among the ignorant people of the house and the small tradesmen of the neighborhood–who found her name not easy of pronunciation by the average English tongue–she was known by the friendly nickname of “The French Miss.” When I knew her, she was resigned to her lonely life among strangers. Some years had elapsed since she had lost her parents, and had left France. Possessing a small, very small, income of her own, she added to it by coloring miniatures for the photographers. She had relatives still living in France; but she had long since ceased to correspond with them. “Ask me nothing more about my family,” she used to say. “I am as good as dead in my own country and among my own people.”