But when she got down to the brightly-lighted salon her cheeks were so pale and her eyes so startled-looking that her mother was quite concerned, and eagerly asked what was the matter.

“Nothing,” said Jeanne at first, after the manner of little girls, and boys too, when they do not want to be cross-questioned; but after a while she confessed that she had run into the tapestry room on her way down, and that the moonlight made the figures look as if they were moving—­and—­and—­that Dudu came and stood on the window-sill and croaked at her.

“Dudu stood on the window-sill outside the tapestry room!” repeated her father; “impossible, my child!  Why, Dudu could not by any conceivable means get up there; you might as well say you saw the tortoise there too.”

“If I had called him perhaps he would have come too; I believe Dudu and he are great friends,” thought Jeanne to herself, for her mind was in a queer state of confusion, and she would not have felt very much astounded at anything.  But aloud she only repeated, “I’m sure he was there, dear papa.”

And to satisfy her, her kind father, though he was not so young as he had been, and the bad weather made him very rheumatic, mounted upstairs to the tapestry room, and carefully examined the window inside and out.

“Nothing of the kind to be seen, my little girl,” was his report.  “Master Dudu was hobbling about in the snow on his favourite terrace walk as usual.  I hope the servants give him a little meat in this cold weather, by the by.  I must speak to Eugene about it.  What you fancied was Dudu, my little Jeanne,” he continued, “must have been a branch of the ivy blown across the window.  In the moonlight, and with the reflections of the snow, things take queer shapes.”

“But there is no wind, and the ivy doesn’t grow so high up, and the ivy could not have croaked,” thought Jeanne to herself again, though she was far too well brought up a little French girl to contradict her father by saying so.

“Perhaps so, dear papa,” was all she said.

But her parents still looked a little uneasy.

“She cannot be quite well,” said her mother.  “She must be feverish.  I must tell Marcelline to make her a little tisane when she goes to bed.”

“Ah, bah!” said Jeanne’s white-headed papa.  “What we were speaking of will be a much better cure than tisane.  She needs companionship of her own age.”

Jeanne pricked up her ears at this, and glanced at her mother inquiringly.  Instantly there started into her mind Marcelline’s prophecy about her wish.

“The naughty little Marcelline!” she thought to herself.  “She has been tricking me.  I believe she knew something was going to happen.  Mamma, my dear mamma!” she cried, eagerly but respectfully, “have you something to tell me?  Have you had letters, mamma, from the country, where the little cousin lives?”

Jeanne’s mother softly stroked the cheeks, red enough now, of her excited little daughter.