"I haven't asked you for anything, madame," interrupted the child, with quivering voice,—"I'd die before asking you for anything,—but I have as much right to the road as you."
There was a flash of defiance in the small blue eyes now.
Two street dogs came up on a run. The woman threw down her parcel to them and, retreating, slammed the iron gate after her.
With a wicked swing of her hook the child drove the dogs away and hastily inspected the garbage. A piece of stale crust and some half-decayed fruit rewarded her. A gristled end of beef she threw to the dogs, that watched her wistfully a few yards away.
"Voilà! I divide fair, messieurs," said she, skilfully munching the sound spots out of the fruit and casting the rest on the ground.
"One would have thought madame was about to spread a banquet," she muttered.
She sauntered away, stopping to break the crust with a piece of loose paving, with a sharp eye out for other windfalls.
A young girl saw her from a garden, and shyly peeped through the high wrought-iron fence at the little savage.
Though the latter never stopped a second in her process of mastication, she eyed the other quite as curiously,—something as she might have regarded a strange but beautiful animal through the bars of its cage.
In experience and practical knowledge of life the respective ages of these two might have been reversed; the child of the street been sixteen instead of twelve.