“I want to know—­you are so vexed; are you not?  They say you have lost all your money!”

“Do they?  They are not far wrong then.  Who are ‘they,’ Petite Reine?”

“Oh!  Prince Alexis, and the Duc de Lorance, and mamma, and everybody.  Is it true?”

“Very true, my little lady.”

“Ah!” She gave a long sigh, looking pathetically at him, with her head on one side, and her lips parted; “I heard the Russian gentleman saying that you were ruined.  Is that true, too?”

“Yes, dear,” he answered wearily, thinking little of the child in the desperate pass to which his life had come.

Petite Reine stood by him silent; her proud, imperial young ladyship had a very tender heart, and she was very sorry; she had understood what had been said before her of him vaguely indeed, and with no sense of its true meaning, yet still with the quick perception of a brilliant and petted child.  Looking at her, he saw with astonishment that her eyes were filled with tears.  He put out his hand and drew her to him.

“Why, little one, what do you know of these things?  How did you find me out here?”

She bent nearer to him, swaying her slender figure, with its bright gossamer muslins, like a dainty hare-bell, and lifting her face to his—­earnest, beseeching, and very eager.

“I came—­I came—­please don’t be angry—­because I heard them say you had no money, and I want you to take mine.  Do take it!  Look, it is all bright gold, and it is my own, my very own.  Papa gives it to me to do just what I like with.  Do take it; pray do!”

Coloring deeply, for the Petite Reine had that true instinct of generous natures,—­a most sensitive delicacy for others,—­but growing ardent in her eloquence and imploring in her entreaty, she shook on to Cecil’s knee, out of a little enamel sweetmeat box, twenty bright Napoleons that fell in a glittering shower on the grass.

He started, and looked at her in a silence that she mistook for offense.  She leaned nearer, pale now with her excitement, and with her large eyes gleaming and melting with passionate entreaty.

“Don’t be angry; pray take it; it is all my own, and you know I have bonbons, and books, and playthings, and ponies, and dogs till I am tired of them; I never want the money; indeed I don’t.  Take it, please take it; and if you will only let me ask Papa or Rock they will give you thousands and thousands of pounds, if that isn’t enough.  Do let me!”

Cecil, in silence still, stooped and drew her to him.  When he spoke his voice shook ever so slightly, and he felt his eyes dim with an emotion that he had not known in all his careless life; the child’s words and action touched him deeply, the caressing, generous innocence of the offered gift, beside the enormous extravagance and hopeless bankruptcy of his career, smote him with a keen pang, yet moved him with a strange pleasure.

“Petite Reine,” he murmured gently, striving vainly for his old lightness, “Petite Reine, how some man will love you one day!  Thank you from my heart, my little innocent friend.”