up-stairs had stolen down unawares, (as children are quite as fond as grown folks of forbidden pleasures,) to amuse itself with the water.  But the children were not risen yet, and the saloon was too utterly dark and dismal at that hour to tempt the bravest of them.  Second thoughts reminded me of that certainty, and I looked again.  The figure raised its head from its drooping posture, and gazed vacantly, out of a pair of dim blue eyes, at me.  The eyes were the eyes of little Jacques.

I do not know how I should have been so utterly overcome, but I started up in terror as I felt the dreamy phantom-gaze fixed upon me, raising my hands wildly above my head.  The hammer which I held in my hand to drive back the bolts of the shutters flew from my grasp and struck the great mirror,—­the new mirror which had just been bought, and was not yet hung up.  All the savings of a year were shivered to fragments in an instant.  My horror at this catastrophe recalled my presence of mind; for I was a poor woman, dependent for my bread on the family.  Poor women cannot afford to have fancies; some prompt reality always startles them out of dream or superstition.  My superstition fled in dismay as I stooped over the fragments of the looking-glass.  What should I do?  Where should I hide myself?  I involuntarily took hold of the mirror with the instinctive intention of turning it to the wall.  It was very heavy; I could scarcely lift it.  Pausing a moment, and looking forward at its shattered face in utter anguish of despair, I saw again, repeated in a hundred jagged splinters, up and down in zigzag confusion, in demoniac omnipresence, the uncanny eye, the spectral shape, which had so appalled me.  The little phantom had arisen, its slim finger was outstretched,—­it beckoned, slowly beckoned, growing indistinct, it receded farther and farther out from the saloon towards the shop.

The fascination of a spell was upon me; I turned and followed the retreating figure.  The shutters of the show-window were not yet taken down, but thin lines of light filtered through them,—­light enough to see that the apparition made its way to a forbidden spot slyly haunted by the little boy in his days of mischief,—­a certain shelf where a box of some peculiar sort of expensive confections was kept.  I had seen his mother, with unwonted generosity, give the child a handful of these a day or two before his death.  I could go no farther.  A mighty fear fell upon me, a dimness of vision and a terrible faintness; for that child-phantom, gliding on before, stopped like a retribution at that very spot, and, raising its little hand, pointed to that very box, glancing upward with its solemn eye, as, rising slowly in the air, it grew indistinct, its outlines fading into darkness, and disappeared.

I did not fall or faint, however; I hastened out to the saloon again.  The door of the little room where the coffin stood was open, and Madame stepping out, looked vaguely about her.