The child stumped away on the pavement fronting our hotel, staring at its fist that held the treasure.

‘Poor pet wee drab of it!’ exclaimed my father.  ’One is glad, Richie, to fill a creature out of one’s emptiness.  Now she toddles; she is digesting it rapidly.  The last performance of one’s purse is rarely so pleasant as that.  I owe it to her that I made the discovery in time.’

In this manner I also made the discovery that my father had no further supply of money, none whatever.  How it had run out without his remarking it, he could not tell; he could only assure me that he had become aware of the fact while searching vainly for a coin to bestow on the beggar-girl.  I despatched a letter attested by a notary of the city, applying for money to the banker to whom Colonel Goodwin had introduced me on my arrival on the Continent.  The money came, and in the meantime we had formed acquaintances and entertained them; they were chiefly half-pay English military officers, dashing men.  One, a Major Dykes, my father established in our hotel, and we carried him on to Paris, where, consequent upon our hospitalities, the purse was again deficient.

Two reasons for not regretting it were adduced by my father; firstly, that it taught me not to despise the importance of possessing money; secondly, that we had served our country by assisting Dykes, who was on the scent of a new and terrible weapon of destruction, which he believed to be in the hands of the French Government.  Major Dykes disappeared on the scent, but we had the satisfaction of knowing that we had done our best toward saving the Navy of Great Britain from being blown out of water.  Temple and I laughed over Major Dykes, and he became our puppet for by-play, on account of his enormous whiskers, his passion for strong drinks, and his air of secresy.  My father’s faith in his patriotic devotedness was sufficient to withhold me from suspicions of his character.  Whenever my instinct, or common sense, would have led me to differ with my father in opinion fun supervened; I was willing that everything in the world should be as he would have it be, and took up with a spirit of laughter, too happy in having won him, in having fished him out of the deep sea at one fling of the net, as he said, to care for accuracy of sentiment in any other particular.

Our purse was at its lowest ebb; he suggested no means of replenishing it, and I thought of none.  He had heard that it was possible to live in Paris upon next to nothing with very great luxury, so we tried it; we strolled through the lilac aisles among bonnes and babies, attended military spectacles, rode on omnibuses, dined on the country heights, went to theatres, and had a most pleasurable time, gaining everywhere front places, friendly smiles, kind little services, in a way that would have been incomprehensible to me but for my consciousness of the magical influence of my father’s address, a mixture of the ceremonious and the affable such as the people could not withstand.