“Am I getting very thin?” asked Minima one day, as she held up her transparent hand against the light; “how thin do you think I could get without dying, Aunt Nelly?”

“Oh! a great deal thinner, my darling,” I said, kissing the little fingers, My heart was bound up in the child.  I had been so lonely without her, that now her constant companionship, her half-womanly, half-babyish prattle seemed necessary to me.  There was no longer any question in my mind as to whether I could leave her.  I only wondered what I should do when my year was run out, and only one of those four of hers, for which these wretches had received the payment.

“Some people can get very thin indeed,” she went on, with her shrewd, quaint smile; “I’ve heard the boys at school talk about it.  One of them had seen a living skeleton, that was all skin and bone, and no flesh.  I shouldn’t like to be a living skeleton, and be made a show of.  Do you think I ever shall be, if I stay here four years?  Perhaps they’d take me about as a show.”

“Why, you are talking nonsense, Minima,” I answered.

“Am I?” she said, wistfully, as if the idea really troubled her; “I dream of it often and often.  I can feel all my bones now, and count them, when I’m in bed.  Some of them are getting very sharp.  The boys used to say they’d get as sharp as knives sometimes, and cut through the skin.  But father said it was only boys’ talk.”

“Your father was right,” I answered; “you must think of what he said, not the boys’ talk.”

“But,” she continued, “the boys said sometimes people get so hungry they bite pieces out of their arms.  I don’t think I could ever be so hungry as that; do you?”

“Minima,” I said, starting up, “let us run to Mademoiselle Rosalie’s for some bread-and-milk.”

“You’re afraid of me beginning to eat myself!” she cried, with a little laugh.  But she was the first to reach Mademoiselle Rosalie’s door; and I watched her devouring her bread-and-milk with the eagerness of a ravenous appetite.

Very fast melted away my money.  I could not see the child pining with hunger, though every sou I spent made our return to England more difficult.  Madame Perrier put no hinderance in my way, for the more food we purchased ourselves, the less we ate at her table.  The bitter cold and the coarse food told upon Minima’s delicate little frame.  Yet what could I do?  I dared not write to Mrs. Wilkinson, and I very much doubted if there would be any benefit to be hoped for if I ran the risk.  Minima did not know the address of any one of the persons who had subscribed for her education and board; to her they were only the fathers and mothers of the boys of whom she talked so much.  She was as friendless as I was in the world.

So far away were Dr. Martin Dobree and Tardif, that I dared not count them as friends who could have any power to help me.  Better for Dr. Martin Dobree if he could altogether forget me, and return to his cousin Julia.  Perhaps he had done so already.