All the time that Joyce was pinning her treasure securely in her pocket and putting on her hat and jacket, all the time that she was walking demurely down the road with Marie, she was planning different ways in which to spend her fortune.

“Mademoiselle is very quiet,” ventured Marie, remembering that one of her duties was to keep up an improving conversation with her little mistress.

“Yes,” answered Joyce, half impatiently; “I’ve got something so lovely to think about, that I’d like to go back and sit down in the garden and just think and think until dark, without being interrupted by anybody.”

This was Marie’s opportunity.  “Then mademoiselle might not object to stopping in the garden of the villa which we are now approaching,” she said.  “My friend, Clotilde Robard, is housekeeper there, and I have a very important message to deliver to her.”

Joyce had no objection.  “But, Marie,” she said, as she paused at the gate, “I think I’ll not go in.  It is so lovely and warm out here in the sun that I’ll just sit here on the steps and wait for you.”

Five minutes went by and then ten.  By that time Joyce had decided how to spend every centime in the whole twenty francs, and Marie had not returned.  Another five minutes went by.  It was dull, sitting there facing the lonely highway, down which no one ever seemed to pass.  Joyce stood up, looked all around, and then slowly sauntered down the road a short distance.

Here and there in the crevices of the wall blossomed a few hardy wild flowers, which Joyce began to gather as she walked.  “I’ll go around this bend in the road and see what’s there,” she said to herself.  “By that time Marie will surely be done with her messages.”

No one was in sight in any direction, and feeling that no one could be in hearing distance, either, in such a deserted place, she began to sing.  It was an old Mother Goose rhyme that she hummed over and over, in a low voice at first, but louder as she walked on.

Around the bend in the road there was nothing to be seen but a lonely field where two goats were grazing.  On one side of it was a stone wall, on two others a tall hedge, but the side next her sloped down to the road, unfenced.

Joyce, with her hands filled with the yellow wild flowers, stood looking around her, singing the old rhyme, the song that she had taught the baby to sing before he could talk plainly: 

     “Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn,
     The sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn. 
     Little Blue Blue, oh, where are you? 
     Oh, where are you-u-u-u?”

The gay little voice that had been rising higher and higher, sweet as any bird’s, stopped suddenly in mid-air; for, as if in answer to her call, there was a rustling just ahead of her, and a boy who had been lying on his back, looking at the sky, slowly raised himself out of the grass.

For an instant Joyce was startled; then seeing by his wooden shoes and old blue cotton blouse that he was only a little peasant watching the goats, she smiled at him with a pleasant good morning.