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The geese, recognizing their home, turned into the poultry-yard, and the little one was about to follow them when the Captain stopped her with this question:

“Eh! little girl, what’s your name?”

“Pierette, monsieur, at your service,” she answered, looking at him with her great black eyes, and pushing her disordered locks from her forehead.

“You live in this house, then? I haven’t seen you before.”

“Yes, I know you pretty well, though, for I sleep under the stairs, and you wake me up every evening when you come home.”

“Is that so, my girl? Ah, well, I must walk on my toes in future. How old are you?”

“Nine, monsieur, come All-Saints day.”

“Is the landlady here a relative of yours?”

“No, monsieur, I am in service.”

“And they give you?”

“Soup, and a bed under the stairs.”

“And how came you to be lame like that, my poor little one?”

“By the kick of a cow when I was five.”

“Have you a father or mother?”

The child blushed under her sunburned skin. “I came from the Foundling Hospital,” she said, briefly. Then, with an awkward courtesy, she passed limping into the house, and the Captain heard, as she went away on the pavement of the court, the hard sound of the little wooden leg.

Good heavens! he thought, mechanically walking towards his cafe, that’s not at all the thing. A soldier, at least, they pack off to the Invalides, with the money from his medal to keep him in tobacco. For an officer, they fix up a collectorship, and he marries somewhere in the provinces. But this poor girl, with such an infirmity,–that’s not at all the thing!

Having established in these terms the injustice of fate, the Captain reached the threshold of his dear cafe, but he saw there such a mob of blue blouses, he heard such a din of laughter and click of billiard-balls, that he returned home in very bad humor.

His room–it was, perhaps, the first time that he had spent in it several hours of the day–looked rather shabby. His bed-curtains were the color of an old pipe. The fireplace was heaped with old cigar-stumps, and one could have written his name in the dust on the furniture. He contemplated for some time the walls where the sublime lancer of Leipsic rode a hundred times to a glorious death. Then, for an occupation, he passed his wardrobe in review. It was a lamentable series of bottomless pockets, socks full of holes, and shirts without buttons.

“I must have a servant,” he said.

Then he thought of the little lame girl.

“That’s what I’ll do. I’ll hire the next little room; winter is coming, and the little thing will freeze under the stairs. She will look after my clothes and my linen and keep the barracks clean. A valet, how’s that?”

But a cloud darkened the comfortable picture. The Captain remembered that quarter-day was still a long way off, and that his account at the Cafe Prosper was assuming alarming proportions.

“Not rich enough,” he said to himself. “And in the mean time they are robbing me down there. That is positive. The board is too high, and that wretch of a veterinary plays bezique much too well. I have paid his way now for eight days. Who knows? Perhaps I had better put the little one in charge of the mess, soup au cafe in the morning, stew at noon, and ragout every evening–campaign life, in fact. I know all about that. Quite the thing to try.”

Going out he saw at once the mistress of the house, a great brutal peasant, and the little lame girl, who both, with pitchforks in their hands, were turning over the dung-heap in the yard.

“Does she know how to sew, to wash, to make soup?” he asked, brusquely.

“Who–Pierette? Why?”

“Does she know a little of all that?”

“Of course. She came from an asylum where they learn how to take care of themselves.”

“Tell me, little one,” added the Captain, speaking to the child, “I am not scaring you–no? Well, my good woman, will you let me have her? I want a servant.”