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Cissy had said truly that Marion was a curious mixture of simplicity and wisdom, child and woman. I wonder if in this lay her peculiar charm? But this, indeed, I cannot tell. The charm I have felt, deeply too, but like other sweet and beautiful things, I endeavoured in vain to analyse or define it.

The girl tried to read, or write or work; but all her attempts were useless. Like a naughty schoolboy, who has resolution enough to plan it truant expedition, but fails to conceal his excitement beforehand, so Marion was on the point a dozen times that morning, of betraying her strange intention. Had Cissy not been tired and sleepy when Marion peeped in to wish her good morning, she would infallibly have detected some unusual signs of excitement in her young cousin’s manner. A word from her and the whole would have been in her possession, and then — Marion’s life might have been more happily common-place, and this story of it would, in all probability, never have been written.

However it was not so to be. Twelve o’clock came at last, and with her little cavalier and Thérèse as escort, Marion sallied forth. The Rue des Lauriers she learnt from Thérèse, was about a quarter of a mile only from the street in which Mme. Poulin’s house was situated. Anxious that Charlie’s walk should not be curtailed on her account, and perhaps not sorry in her secret heart to delay, if only for half-an-hour, the task she had set herself, Marion proposed that they should in the first place take a stroll beyond the town. The day was much cooler than the preceding one. Indeed, it was cloudy enough to suggest the possibility of not far distant rain. Marion’s beautiful mountains were all but hidden in mist, and it was difficult to believe in the blue sky of yesterday. Still there were now and then breaks in the mist and clouds, showing that the loveliness was veiled only, not destroyed, Charlie’s remarks apropos of everything, from the fog-covered bills to the sisters of charity with their enormous flapping caps, were amusing enough. But Marion was too engrossed by her own thoughts to listen with her usual attention. As they reached the end of Rue des Laurier’s, a slight drizzle began to fall and Marion told Thérèse to hasten home with Charlie, as she herself had a call to make some little way up the street.