The carriage was quickly driven to the street indicated, which runs quite near, in close parallel with the temple of St. Geneviève on its southern side, and the Jehu, with a crack of his whip, drew up before number thirty—a tall, substantial, square-built house.
'Now, my child, take my arm,' said the stranger in the frieze coat, rising and assisting his wearied charge to the door.
No sooner had the faltering creature reached the steps of the carriage, than a blithe female voice rang out from a window on the third story:
'Welcome, Berthe—welcome, our little song-bird.'
The girl raised her eyes in a stupefied daze, her frame quivered, the blood fled from her cheeks, and for the second time she sank into the arms of our friend, who stood luckily behind her, in a profound swoon; but this time it was a swoon of joy.
CHAPTER IV.
THE SONG-BIRD'S NEST.
JOY seldom kills. Before the female figure, whose apparition at the window had thrown the girl, so strangely fallen under O'Hara's protection, into her second swoon, had time to trip down the stairs, the attack had spent itself, even without the intervention of the brandy-flask of him whose name was not Beelzebub. The sensitive creature was smothered with kisses by her friend, the while the two male observers of the situation looked on and at each other with a comical stare of envy. The newcomer was a slender, willowy woman, of a meridional cast of countenance—hair rich and dark in hue, features proud and delicately chiselled, and complexion swarthy. She was tall in stature and gracefully built, but rather inclined to the meagre, and seemed as if she had aged before her time. She might not have been more than twenty-three, but she looked as if verging on thirty, and yet there was quite a youthful impetuosity in her manner, and springiness in her movements, as she literally devoured her little friend in her embraces. In the middle of this tantalizing greeting, he whom we shall call Friezecoat, for want of an introduction, called out in his rough and ready voice:
'Ho, ho, my pets! I protest against this, unless we lords of creation are admitted into the arrangement.'
The brunette turned a look of chilling surprise at him, as if questioning who was this intruder who spoke so familiarly. Then, holding the little girl of the chestnut hair, whom she saluted as Song-bird, at arm's-length, as if to examine the Song-bird's plumage, she exclaimed:
'Berthe, you little fool, why did you faint? How do you account for coming home thus?'