So "hope clad in April green" made life worth living for father and mother; and, as for Fleur-de-lis, she was a child; and she had love, and that was enough, and it is sad when we grow so old that it does not suffice for us. But these days, so full of care and anxiety, of weariness and self-denial tinged with happiness, came to an end; for when Fleur-de-lis was two years old, Maman Marie, young and strong, passionately in love with life, desperately needed by husband and child, had to leave them, to journey on alone to another far country, having just grown wonted to this.
Then the light went out of the two little rooms that had been home; indeed, it seemed to go out of the world altogether. Hard times and yet harder ones descended upon poor Pierre Dupont. Marie's earnings no longer helped to swell the slender income, and there were no willing woman's hands to cut and plan and save, to contrive and embellish. Added to this, the piano suddenly grew uncertain, and subject to grave musical lapses, attacks of aphasia in the middle of some tunes, and of asthma in the middle of others; so that the hoot of the stony-hearted bystander and the ruffianly small boy became familiar to Pierre's ears; for he could not afford to buy new cylinders to fit into the old instrument, and to keep it up to the demands of the street, which is always delighted if you "cannot sing the old songs," and wishes the latest melody to the exclusion of everything else.
Fleur-de-lis had been left in the care of a woman for many weeks after Marie's death, but the sight of her tear-stained face at night, the tender frenzy with which she lifted her arms to her father when he came in, the sob of joy with which she buried her head in his coat, the sigh of content with which she stroked his cheek between every mouthful of bread and milk as she sat on his knee eating her meagre supper--all this was too much for his loving heart. He had a small sum of money that he had been hoarding to attach "Annie Rooney" and "Comrades" to his unfashionable instrument, that he might appease the public by the gratification of its darling wishes, and withdraw the Boulanger march from its sated ears. This money he took and went to a carpenter's shop in the neighbourhood. After many explanations in his broken English, and many diagrams rudely drawn on paper, the carpenter succeeded in building a primitive sort of baby-carriage on one end of the street-piano. It had two wheels of its own, and moved somewhat in harmony with the ancient instrument, which had its difficulties of locomotion nowadays, as well as its musical weaknesses. It had a drawer in which Fleur-de-lis's playthings were kept--a battered doll, and boxes of her favourite scraps of bright tissue-paper, the top of an old cotton umbrella, and a square of rubber cloth like that which covered the piano when it rained. Here Fleur-de-lis sat for many hours each day, happy and content. Pierre would often take her out, and let her toddle by his side until she was tired, when she would ascend her throne again. She wore a faded corduroy jacket and an old woollen cap, but the flower-face that smiled above the one, and the shower of chestnut hair that fell from beneath the other, made you forget the poverty of her raiment. She was always clean and sweet and comfortable, for Pierre, with the gentleness and patience of a woman, washed and even mended, in a rough sort of a way, that the child might not wholly miss a mother's care.