would have found them harder still without the memory of
Monsieur Horace, and her promise to him, to fill her heart and
imagination, and her thoughts reverted to him now; how, when
she had made his fortune, she would take it all to him; how he
would look, what he would say. This was a little picture the
child was never weary of imagining to herself. She filled it
in with a hundred different backgrounds, to suit the fancy of
the moment; she tinted it with the brightest colours. Out in
the vague future, into which no one can venture to look
without some point on which to rest the mind, this little
scene had gradually become at once the end of her present
hopes, the beginning of another life, of which, indeed, she
knew nothing, but that it lay in a sort of luminous haze of
success and happiness. She never doubted she would attain it;
it was not an affair of the imagination only, it was to be a
most certain reality; she had arranged it all in those long
weeks gone by, and now that the beginning was actually made,
she was ready to look at it from the most practical point of
view. Taking out her little purse, she began to count her
money for at least the fiftieth time, as she walked along in
the darkness.

"I have here twenty-six francs," she said to herself; "out of
these, I must pay my journey to Spa. Why should I not go to
Spa on foot? It cannot be a very long way; I remember that
papa sometimes went backwards and forwards twice in the day
from Chaudfontaine. I have already come a great way, and I am
not in the lest fatigued. If I could do that, I should save a
great deal of money--not that I am afraid I shall not have
plenty without that; ten francs would be sufficient, but it