“They beat me—because—I—I have no—papa—no papa.”
“What!” said the man, smiling; “why, everybody has one.”
The child answered painfully amid his spasms of grief:
“But I—I—I have none.”
Then the workman became serious. He had recognized La Blanchotte's son, and, although himself a new arrival in the neighborhood, he had a vague idea of her history.
“Well,” said he, “console yourself, my boy, and come with me home to your mother. They will give you—a papa.”
And so they started on the way, the big fellow holding the little fellow by the hand, and the man smiled, for he was not sorry to see this Blanchotte, who was, it was said, one of the prettiest girls of the countryside, and, perhaps, he was saying to himself, at the bottom of his heart, that a lass who had erred might very well err again.
They arrived in front of a very neat little white house.
“There it is,” exclaimed the child, and he cried, “Mamma!”
A woman appeared, and the workman instantly left off smiling, for he saw at once that there was no fooling to be done with the tall pale girl who stood austerely at her door as though to defend from one man the threshold of that house where she had already been betrayed by another. Intimidated, his cap in his hand, he stammered out: