“Your pealings; it’s feelings you mean, rose of my heart,” said her nurse, drawing the child nearer to her. “Tell your good Bridget what you did to the naughty boy.”
The little girl, for some reason or other, was shy about confessing the provocation that she had given her playmate; but her nurse, whose curiosity had been aroused, was determined to extract a confession from her, and adroitly made use of the presence of the sergeant, who had by this time arrived on the scene.
“See, lovie dove,” she murmured in the child’s ear, “here’s a great big monster of a policeman, and he’s looking at ye. Tell him sharp.”
The little girl shuddered, hid her face in her nurse’s breast, and whispered, “I ’sulted his remperor.”
“And you served him right,” said Bridget. “The grasping old frog-eater. If I had a child that worshipped his bones, it’s shutting him up in prison I’d be after doing till he learned better sense,” and she made a vindictive gesture in Eugene’s direction.
Her nurse’s championship restored courage to the breast of the little girl; and slipping from her knee, she jumped nimbly to the stone seat beside them, and stretched out both her tiny hands toward the noble head carved above her.
“I ’sulted him,” she cried, tossing back her curls from her flushed rosy cheeks. “I made a face at him like this,” and she screwed up her little visage in a detestable grimace, “and I said, ‘Eugene, I hate your old remperor;’ then he sweeped me over the ground.”
A slight flush overspread the boy’s pale face, but he did not deny the accusation.
“Well, now, Virgie Manning,” said the boy’s nurse in a severe manner, “that was real mean in you. You’re only a little girl, but you ought to be ashamed of yourself to taunt a little boy that sets such store by his emperor. Look at here, officer,” and she appealed to the sergeant; “you’ve often seen us in these Fens. This little boy,” and she pointed to Eugene, “is French, and he’s got such a love for foreign things that you can’t get it out of him. He justs worships the emperor. I don’t rightly know which one it was”—
“His majesty, the great Napoleon, the greatest emperor the world has ever seen,” murmured the boy, lifting his cap with an indescribable mingling of reverence and grace.