Now the tears were in the girl’s eyes.  “And could I be whiter than I am?” she asked.

“Oh, no, no!  ’Tite Poulette,” cried the other; “but if we were only real white!—­both of us; so that some gentleman might come to see me and say ’Madame John, I want your pretty little chick.  She is so beautiful.  I want to take her home.  She is so good—­I want her to be my wife.’  Oh, my child, my child, to see that I would give my life—­I would give my soul!  Only you should take me along to be your servant.  I walked behind two young men to-night; they ware coming home from their office; presently they began to talk about you.”

’Tite Poulette’s eyes flashed fire.

“No, my child, they spoke only the best things One laughed a little at times and kept saying ‘Beware!’ but the other—­I prayed the Virgin to bless him, he spoke such kind and noble words.  Such gentle pity; such a holy heart!  ‘May God defend her,’ he said, cherie; he said, ’May God defend her, for I see no help for her.’  The other one laughed and left him.  He stopped in the door right across the street.  Ah, my child, do you blush?  Is that something to bring the rose to your cheek?  Many fine gentlemen at the ball ask me often, ’How is your daughter, Madame John?’”.

The daughter’s face was thrown into the mother’s lap, not so well satisfied, now, with God’s handiwork.  Ah, how she wept!  Sob, sob, sob; gasps and sighs and stifled ejaculations, her small right hand clinched and beating on her mother’s knee; and the mother weeping over her.

Kristian Koppig shut his window.  Nothing but a generous heart and a Dutchman’s phlegm could have done so at that moment.  And even thou, Kristian Koppig!—­for the window closed very slowly.

He wrote to his mother, thus: 

“In this wicked city, I see none so fair as the poor girl who lives opposite me, and who, alas! though so fair, is one of those whom the taint of caste has cursed.  She lives a lonely, innocent life in the midst of corruption, like the lilies I find here in the marshew, and I have great pity for her.  ‘God defend her,’ I said to-night to a fellow clerk, ‘I see no help for her.’  I know there is a natural, and I think proper, horror of mixed blood (excuse the mention, sweet mother), and I feel it, too; and yet if she were in Holland today, not one of a hundred suitors would detect the hidden blemish.”

In such strain this young man wrote on trying to demonstrate the utter impossibility of his ever loving the lovable unfortunate, until the midnight tolling of the cathedral clock sent him to bed.

About the same hour Zalli and ’Tite Poulette were kissing good-night.

“’Tite Poulette, I want you to promise me one thing.”

“Well, Maman?”

“If any gentleman should ever love you and ask you to marry,—­not knowing, you know,—­promise me you will not tell him you are not white.”

“It can never be,” said ’Tite Poulette.