A soft clear red glowed in her dark cheeks and her eyes were very bright and very black. She was small and of slender build, but she seemed sufficiently healthy.
"Father, why do I have to speak a _different_ language from Mollie's?" (She had never called her stepmother by any other name, since her fastidious father had objected to "Maw.") "What difference does it make anyway, if I say I _did_ it or I _done_ it?"
Here was rebellion! Her small dark father looked at her again. This time not so contentedly.
"Arise from that trunk," said Mr. Duval, whose speech retained a slight foreign touch that most people found most pleasing. "I think I shall have to show you something that I have been keeping for you."
Jeannette hopped up, gleefully. She had always wondered what that trunk contained. Now, it seemed, she was about to find out. From a crack in the wall, Mr. Duval fished a small key, fitted it to the lock, turned it, and lifted the lid. There was a tray containing a few packages of letters and a small box.
Her father opened the little box and drew from it something that had once been white, but was now yellow. Something wonderfully fine and exquisite, with a strange, faint perfume about it. A lace handkerchief. Even Jeanne, who knew nothing of laces, felt that there was something especially fine and beautiful about the filmy thing in her hands.
"Your mother's," assented Mr. Duval. "Is it like anything of Mollie's? Well, your mother wasn't like Mollie. She was fine and exquisite like this little bit of lace. Now, here is something else for you to see."
Mr. Duval placed in his daughter's hand a small oval frame containing a wonderful bit of painting. A woman's beautiful face. The countenance of a very _young_ woman, with a tender light in her brown eyes. And _such_ a pretty mouth. And oh! such dainty garments, so becomingly worn.
"Your mother," said the little man, briefly.
"Why!" gasped Jeanne. "She was a _lady_!"
"Yes," admitted her father. "She was a lady."
"And when she died, you married _Mollie_!"
"When she died, I died too, I think. I was ill, ill. I walked through the streets with you in my arms one day, here in this strange town when your mother's sickness compelled her to leave the steamboat. You were two years old. In my illness, I fell in the street near the door of Mollie's mother's house, near the cemetery where they had laid your most beautiful mother. They took me in and cared for me and for you. For weeks I was very, very ill--a fever. I did not improve--I _wanted_ to die. But slowly, very slowly I grew better. Your mother had married against her father's wishes. Her father, I knew, would not receive you; and _I_ would ask no favors.