“And do you live alone? Have you no one else in this house?”
“I have old Babette, whom you saw at the door.”
“And no one else?”
“Is not that enough?”
“And has there never been any one else? And are you happy here?” asked Frederica, wonder struggling with the gravity in her face.
“Ah, well! as to that—like the rest of the world, I suppose,” said Mr St. Cyr, with his wonderful shrug; but there came a look of pain over his face that startled the little girl, and made her wish that she had gone away before, so she rose hastily, and said,—
“Adieu—and—pardon me, Cousin Cyprien.”
“To meet soon, my little cousin,” said he, bowing over her offered hand, “as if I were quite grown up,” thought Frederica again, in the midst of her confusion.
He went with her through the outer room and through the dim hall to the street door, and then a new thought seemed to strike him.
“You will think I am a wicked old spider sitting here in the dark to catch unwary flies, if I let you go so. You shall come upstairs to see that the sun shines here too, and that I am not altogether unlike my fellow-men, though I am quite alone. Come upstairs, my child.”