She hesitated.  Then she called for pen and paper, and scribbled in violet ink: 

MONSIEUR MY GODFATHER,
I see that the good God still permits miracles.  You are one. 
Accept, then, a poor girl’s thanks and prayers! 
Thy godchild,
DENISE.

She gave this to Henri, who received it respectfully.  Then she went out, feeling very much better and brighter because of a sadly needed dinner.  She was bewildered, and excited; but she wasn’t afraid.  She accepted her miracle, which had come just in the nick of time, gratefully, with a childlike simplicity.  But she used her blue eyes, and one day they met Peter Champneys’s, regarding her with a good and kind satisfaction; for indeed she looked much better and brighter, now that she was no longer half starved.  Denise had encountered other eyes, men’s eyes; but none had ever met hers with just such a look as she saw in these clear and golden ones.  A flash of intuition came to her.  Only one person in the world could have eyes like that—­it must be, it was, he!  And she watched him with an absorbed and breathless interest.

In these small restaurants of the Quartier one sits so close to one’s neighbors, in a busy hour, that conversation isn’t difficult; it is, rather, inevitable.

“Monsieur,” said the young girl, bravely and yet timidly, on an occasion when they almost touched elbows, “Monsieur,—­is it you who have a god-daughter?”

“Mademoiselle,” stammered Peter, who hadn’t expected the question.  “I do not know your godfather!” And then he turned red to his ears.

Her face broke into a swift and flashing smile.  She looked so like a happy child that Peter had to smile back at her, and presently they were chatting like old acquaintances.  After that they always managed to dine together.

They found each other delightful.  That gloomy sense of loneliness which had oppressed Peter vanished in the girl’s presence.  As for Denise, no one had ever been so kind, so gentle, so generous to her as this wonderful Monsieur Champneys.  She grew quite beautiful; her eyes were a child’s eyes, her face like one of those little sweet pinkish-white roses one sees in old-fashioned gardens.

She had no relations; neither had Peter.  And so he took Denise into his life, just as he had once taken a lost kitten out of the dusk on the Riverton Road:  there really was nothing else for him to do!  He had for her something of the same whimsical and compassionate affection that had made him share his glass of milk with the little cat.  She belonged to him; there was nobody else.

She was rather a silent creature, Denise.  She had none of that Latin vivacity which wearies the listener, but her love for him showed itself in a thousand gracious ways, in innumerable small services, in loving looks.  Just to touch him was a never-failing joy to her.  She delighted to stroke his face, to trace with her small fingers the outline of his features.  “That is the pattern on the inside of my heart,” she told him.  She had a quick, light tread, pleasant to listen to, and her rare and lovely laughter was always a delicious surprise, as if one heard an unexpected chime of little bells.