“If a traveler threw me some halfpence, he would pick them up out of the dust and bring them to me, clever little spaniel that he was!  I was less miserable so long as I had that friend.  Every day I put away a few halfpence, for I wanted to get fifteen francs together, so that I might buy him of Pere Manseau.  One day his wife saw that the dog was fond of me, so she herself took a sudden violent fancy to him.  The dog, mind you, could not bear her.  Oh, animals know people by instinct!  If you really care for them, they find it out in a moment.  I had a gold coin, a twenty-franc piece, sewed into the band of my skirt; so I spoke to M. Manseau:  ’Dear sir, I meant to offer you my year’s savings for your dog; but now your wife has a mind to keep him, although she cares very little about him, and rather than that, will you sell him to me for twenty francs?  Look, I have the money here.’

“‘No, no, little woman,’ he said; ’put up your twenty francs.  Heaven forbid that I should take their money from the poor!  Keep the dog; and if my wife makes a fuss about it, you must go away.’

“His wife made a terrible to-do about the dog.  Ah! mon Dieu! any one might have thought the house was on fire!  You never would guess the notion that next came into her head.  She saw that the little fellow looked on me as his mistress, and that she could only have him against his will, so she had him poisoned; and my poor spaniel died in my arms. . . .  I cried over him as if he had been my child, and buried him under a pine-tree.  You do not know all that I laid in that grave.  As I sat there beside it, I told myself that henceforward I should always be alone in the world; that I had nothing left to hope for; that I should be again as I had been before, a poor lonely girl; that I should never more see a friendly light in any eyes.  I stayed out there all through the night, praying God to have pity on me.  When I went back to the highroad I saw a poor little child, about ten years old, who had no hands.

“‘God has heard me,’ I thought.  I had prayed that night as I had never prayed before.  ’I will take care of the poor little one; we will beg together, and I will be a mother to him.  Two of us ought to do better than one; perhaps I should have more courage for him than I have for myself.’

“At first the little boy seemed to be quite happy, and, indeed, he would have been hard to please if he had not been content.  I did everything that he wanted, and gave him the best of all that I had; I was his slave in fact, and he tyrannized over me, but that was nicer than being alone, I used to think!  Pshaw! no sooner did the little good-for-nothing know that I carried a twenty-franc piece sewed into my skirtband than he cut the stitches, and stole my gold coin, the price of my poor spaniel!  I had meant to have masses said with it. . . .  A child without hands, too!  Oh, it makes one shudder!  Somehow that theft took all the heart out of me.  It seemed as if I was to love nothing but it should come to some wretched end.