The next day Pepsie, sitting sorrowfully at her window, trying to find consolation in a game of solitaire, saw a private carriage drive up to the empty house and wait, while the servant made inquiries for Madame Jozain.
“Madame Jozain did live there,” said M. Fernandez politely, “but she went away between two days, and we know nothing at all about her. There was something strange about it, or she never would have left without telling her friends good-by, and leaving some future address.”
The servant imparted this scanty information to the lady in the carriage, who drove away looking greatly disappointed.
The arrival of this elegant visitor directly following upon madame’s flight furnished a subject for romantic conjecture.
“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Pepsie, “if that was Lady’s mama, who has come back after all! Oh, how dreadful that she wasn’t here to see her!” and then poor Pepsie cried, and would not be consoled.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE LITTLE STREET SINGER
It was Christmas Eve, and very nearly dark, when Mrs. Lanier, driving up St. Charles Avenue in her comfortable carriage quite filled with costly presents for her children, noticed a forlorn little figure, standing alone at a street corner. There was something about the sorrowful looking little figure that moved her strangely, for she turned and watched it as long as she could discern the child’s face in the gathering twilight.
It was a little girl, thinly clad in a soiled and torn white frock; her black stockings were full of holes, and her shoes so worn that the tiny white toes were visible through the rents. She hugged a thin, faded shawl around her shoulders, and her yellow hair fell in matted, tangled strands below her waist; her small face was pale and pinched, and had a woe-begone look that would melt the hardest heart. Although she was soiled and ragged, she did not look like a common child, and it was that indefinable something in her appearance that attracted Mrs. Lanier’s attention, for she thought as the carriage whirled by and left the child far behind, “Poor little thing! she didn’t look like a street beggar. I wish I had stopped and spoken to her!”
It was Lady Jane, and her descent in the scale of misery had been rapid indeed.
Since that night, some four months before, when Madame Jozain had awakened her rudely and told her she must come away, she had lived in a sort of wretched stupor. It was true she had resisted at first, and had cried desperately for Pepsie, for Mam’selle Diane, for Gex—but all in vain; Madame had scolded and threatened and frightened her into submission.