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“If you will support her.”

“Then that is finished. Here are twenty francs. Let her have to-night a dress and a shoe. To-morrow we’ll arrange the rest.”

And, with a friendly tap on Pierette’s cheek, the Captain went off, delighted that everything was concluded. Possibly he thought he would have to cut off some glasses of beer and absinthe, and be cautious of the veterinary’s skill at bezique. But that was not worth speaking of, and the new arrangement would be quite the thing.

IV.

Captain, you are a coward!

Such was the apostrophe with which the caryatides of the Cafe Prosper hereafter greeted the Captain, whose visits became rarer day by day.

For the poor man had not seen all the consequences of his good action. The suppression of his morning absinthe had been sufficient to cover the modest expense of Pierette’s keeping, but how many other reforms were needed to provide for the unforeseen expenses of his bachelor establishment! Full of gratitude, the little girl wished to prove it by her zeal. Already the aspect of his room was changed. The furniture was dusted and arranged, the fireplace cleaned, the floor polished, and spiders no longer spun their webs over the deaths of Poniatowski in the corner. When the Captain came home the inviting odor of cabbage-soup saluted him on the staircase, and the sight of the smoking plates on the coarse but white table-cloth, with a bunch of flowers and polished table-ware, was quite enough to give him a good appetite. Pierette profited by the good-humor of her master to confess some of her secret ambitions. She wanted andirons for the fireplace, where there was now always a fire burning, and a mould for the little cakes that she knew how to make so well. And the Captain, smiling at the child’s requests, but charmed with the homelike atmosphere of his room, promised to think of it, and on the morrow replaced his Londres by cigars for a sou each, hesitated to offer five points at ecarte, and refused his third glass of beer or his second glass of chartreuse.

Certainly the struggle was long; it was cruel. Often, when the hour came for the glass that was denied him by economy, when thirst seized him by the throat, the Captain was forced to make an heroic effort to withdraw his hand already reaching out towards the swan’s beak of the cafe; many times he wandered about, dreaming of the king turned up and of quint and quatorze. But he almost always courageously returned home; and as he loved Pierette more through every sacrifice that he made for her, he embraced her more fondly every day. For he did embrace her. She was no longer his servant. When once she stood before him at the table, calling him “Monsieur,” and so respectful in her bearing, he could not stand it, but seizing her by her two hands, he said to her, eagerly:

“First embrace me, and then sit down and do me the pleasure of speaking familiarly, confound it!”

And so to-day it is accomplished. Meeting a child has saved that man from an ignominious age.

He has substituted for his old vices a young passion. He adores the little lame girl who skips around him in his room, which is comfortable and well furnished.

He has already taught Pierette to read, and, moreover, recalling his calligraphy as a sergeant-major, he has set her copies in writing. It is his greatest joy when the child, bending attentively over her paper, and sometimes making a blot which she quickly licks up with her tongue, has succeeded in copying all the letters of an interminable adverb in ment. His uneasiness is in thinking that he is growing old and has nothing to leave his adopted child.

And so he becomes almost a miser; he theorizes; he wishes to give up his tobacco, although Pierette herself fills and lights his pipe for him. He counts on saving from his slender income enough to purchase a little stock of fancy goods. Then when he is dead she can live an obscure and tranquil life, hanging up somewhere in the back room of the small shop an old cross of the Legion of Honor, her souvenir of the Captain.

Every day he goes to walk with her on the rampart. Sometimes they are passed by folks who are strangers in the village, who look with compassionate surprise at the old soldier, spared from the wars, and the poor lame child. And he is moved–oh, so pleasantly, almost to tears–when one of the passers-by whispers, as they pass:

“Poor father! Yet how pretty his daughter is.”