“Well? Well? How you get in here?” demanded Monsieur Prefontaine.
“M’sieu, I—I-crawled in!” I stammered, indicating the hole in the fence.
“Bien! Crawl out, madame!”
“Madame” to me, who was but twelve years old!
“Crawl out!” commanded Monsieur, pointing to the hole, and feeling like a worm, ignominiously, under the awful eye of that ex-mayor of Hochelaga, on hands and knees and stomach, I crawled out.
Once on our side, I felt not the shame of being a thief so much as the degradation of crawling out with that man looking.
Feeling like a desperate criminal, I swaggered up to the house, swinging my half-filled basket of strawberries. As I came up the path, Ellen, a sister just two years older than I, put her head out of an upper window and called down to me:
“Marion, there’s a beggar boy coming in at the gate. Give him some of that stale bread mama left on the kitchen table to make a pudding with.”
The boy was about thirteen, and he was a very dirty boy, with hardly any clothes on him. As I looked at him, I was thrilled with a most beautiful inspiration. I could regenerate myself by doing an act of lovely charity.
“Wait a minute, boy.”