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And now these good Bayards, learning of the death of Mother Voisin, could not bear the thought that the little girl who had been nourished at the same breast with their boy should be abandoned to public charity, so they went to Argenteuil for Norine.

Poor little one! Since the fifteen days that her mother slept in the cemetery she had been taken charge of by a cousin who kept a billiard-saloon; and though she was not yet five years old, she had been put to work washing the beer-glasses.

The Bayards found her charming, with great eyes as blue as the summer sun, and her thick blond tresses escaping from her ugly black bonnet. Leon, who had been brought with his nurse, embraced his foster sister; and the cousin, who that very morning had boxed the orphan’s ears for negligence in sweeping out the hall, appeared before the Parisians to be as much touched as if parting with Norine was a heart-breaking affair.

The order for an ample breakfast restored his serenity.

It was a beautiful Sunday in June, and they were in the country–“an occasion which should be improved,” declared Bayard, “by taking the air; shouldn’t it, Mimi?”

And while pretty Madame Bayard, having pinned up her skirts, went out with the children and the nurse to pick flowers in a neighboring field, the druggist, who was less ambitious, treated the saloon-keeping cousin to a glass of vermouth, seated at the billiard-table, which was covered with dead flies. They breakfasted under a vineless arbor, which the hot noonday sun riddled with its rays. But what of that? They were pleased and contented all the same. Madame Bayard had hung her hat on the lattice; and her husband, wearing a bargeman’s straw helmet, which had been lent to him by the saloon-keeper, cut up the duck in the best of spirits. Little Leon and Norine, who had immediately become the best of friends, emptied the salad-bowl of its cream-cheese. Then they all romped in the grass, went boating on the stream, and, intoxicated with the fresh country air, the indwellers of the city, coming from the close Paris streets, pushed to its fullest extreme this idyl in the fashion of Paul de Kock.

For, yes; there was a moment, as they came back in the boat, in a delicious sunset, when tinted clouds floated in a glowing sky, when Madame Bayard–the serious Madame Bayard–whose frown turned to stone the shop-boys of the druggist, sang the air called “To the Shores of France,” to the rhythmic fall of the oars, plied by her husband in his shirt-sleeves. They dined in the arbor where they had breakfasted, but the second repast was a shade less happy. The night-moths, which dashed in to burn themselves at the candles, frightened the children; and Madame Bayard was so tired that she could not even guess the simple rebus on her dessert napkin.

Never mind; it has been a good day; and on their return in a first-class carriage–this was not a time for petty economies–Madame Bayard, with her head on her husband’s shoulder, watching Leon and Norine, limp with sleep on the lap of the nurse, half asleep herself, murmured to her husband, in a happy voice:

“See, Ferdinand; we have done well to take the little one. She will be a comrade for Leon. They will be like brother and sister.”

III.

In fact, they did thus grow up together.

They were most kind-hearted people, these Bayards. They made no difference between the humble orphan and their own dear boy, who would one day in the firm of “Bayard & Son” work monopolies in rhubarb and corners in castor-oil; indeed, they loved as their own child little Norine, who was as intelligent as she was charming, as fair in mind as she was delicate in body.

Now the nurse took the two children to the square of the Tour Saint-Jacques when the weather was pleasant, and in the evening at the family table there were two high-chairs side by side for the boy and his foster sister.