“Little Charlotte climbed over the railings,” continued Dudu, “but she did not jump down on the other side, for Mademoiselle Eliane, who was tall, found that by standing half-way up the bank she could reach the child and hand her down to Mademoiselle Jeanne, a little way below.  There was a good deal of laughing over it all, and this helped them to make friends more quickly than anything else would have done.  But indeed Charlotte was not a shy child, she had travelled too much and seen too many people to be so, and our young ladies, besides, were so kind and merry that no little girl could long have been strange with them.  She ran about the garden in the greatest delight; her new friends showed her all their favourite nooks, and allowed her to make a bouquet of the flowers she liked best; and when they were tired of standing about they all sat down together on a bank, and Charlotte told to the young ladies the story of her short life.  It was a sad little story; her father had died when she was very young, and her mother, whose health had never been good after the shock of his death, had gone to Italy with the aunt who had brought her up, in hopes of growing stronger.  But through two or three years of sometimes seeming better and sometimes worse, she had really been steadily failing, and at last she died, leaving her poor little girl almost alone, ‘for the old aunt was now,’ said Charlotte, ‘always ill, and not ill as mamma used to be,’ she added, for however tired she was, she always liked her little girl to be beside her, and never wearied of listening to all she had to say.

“‘But now,’ said the child, ’I am always alone, and it is so sad.  And I have watched you so often from the balcony, and wished I might come down to you.  And now, if you will let me come to see you every day, I shall be so happy.’

“She was a dear little girl, so sweet, and simple, and loving.  She quite gained our young ladies’ hearts with her pretty ways and her funny little English, accent.  They kissed her on both cheeks, and told her they would be very pleased for her to come to them in the garden whenever she saw them from the balcony, as she was so sure her aunt would not object to it.  They could not invite her to the house, they explained, unless their mother and her aunt had made acquaintance.  Of course it would not have done, as little Charlotte quite understood; for in those days,” Dudu observed in passing, “politeness and ceremony were much more observed than is at present, I am sorry to say, the case.

“The little English girl, however,” he went on, “was only too delighted to have received permission to visit them in their garden.  And not many days passed on which she did not join them there.  It was a lovely summer that year—­I remember it so well.  Never now does the sun seem to me to shine quite so brightly as in those days.  Perhaps it is that I am growing old, perhaps the sad days that soon after followed left a cloud on my memory