She interrupted him with a terrified cry.
“Do you think he will come here?”
“Dame! it appears to me extremely probable he will. It would show great lack of curiosity if he didn’t, since he knows he has a young one here that he has never seen. And then there’s you, besides, and you’re not so very homely but he might like to have another look at you.”
She gave him an entreating glance that silenced his rude attempt at gallantry. Charlot, awakened by the sound of their voices, had raised his head. With the blinking eyes of one suddenly aroused from slumber he looked about the room, and recalled the words that some idle fellow of the village had taught him; and with the solemn gravity of a little man of three he announced:
“Dey’re loafers, de Prussians!”
His mother went and caught him frantically in her arms and seated him on her lap. Ah! the poor little waif, at once her delight and her despair, whom she loved with all her soul and who brought the tears to her eyes every time she looked on him, flesh of her flesh, whom it wrung her heart to hear the urchins with whom he consorted in the street tauntingly call “the little Prussian!” She kissed him, as if she would have forced the words back into his mouth.
“Who taught my darling such naughty words? It’s not nice; you must not say them again, my loved one.”
Whereon Charlot, with the persistency of childhood, laughing and squirming, made haste to reiterate:
“Dey’re dirty loafers, de Prussians!”
And when his mother burst into tears he clung about her neck and also began to howl dismally. Mon Dieu, what new evil was in store for her! Was it not enough that she had lost in Honoré the one single hope of her life, the assured promise of oblivion and future happiness? and was that man to appear upon the scene again to make her misery complete?