Lisle Georges Montfleur Saint Frère.
Postscript. Tell Dian I will have some stories to match his one day.
As Marie Josephine stood there under the stars, the letter clasped in her hands, the words that her mother had spoken on the morning that they had left for Les Vignes came back to her: “There may come a time later on when it will not be so easy to get away!”
Chapter VIII
HUMPHREY TRAIL
“Minuit!”
A little girl peered through the gloom of a dark alley, toward the rue Saint Antoine. Her thin, eager face looked anxious and her black eyes darted here and there in search of him who until very recently had been her best friend in all the world, Minuit, an alley cat!
“It’s time to go to bed, ma mie. Come to Vivi,” she called again and suddenly from out of the greyness of the deserted alley, a gaunt, long shape appeared. It was Minuit and when he saw Vivi he ran up to her with a welcoming meow. She stooped and gathered him into her arms, hugging him close to her.
“I’ve been alone all day, for the fat, funny man told me I’d best stay inside to-day. He will be coming soon with my supper.” While she was speaking she was making her way back to an open door through which a faint light was gleaming. She was so used to being alone with Minuit that she found it natural to talk to him as though he were a person.
A jangle of rough voices came down the alley from the shoemaker’s shop on the corner of the rue Saint Antoine. Vivi was not at all frightened of the voices or their owners, for she knew them. They had been friends of her father and he would have been with them, talking far into the night, had he not been killed the summer before by some pieces of lumber from the big pavilion falling on him. The pavilion had been erected after the storming of the Tuileries and he had been one of hundreds who had offered to help put it up. He was a licorice water seller by profession and all that he had left Vivi of worldly goods was his tin tray and the cups dangling from it. She hoped to make some sous in the spring selling the cooling drink in the streets. Now that the cold weather had come, no one was thirsty enough to drink licorice water, and if it had not been for the fat, foreign stranger, who had taken the room above her and who never failed to bring her something to eat when he came in at night, she would have had to go down the alley to beg a bit of bread from the shoemaker.