It took one month and three days for Judy to get the above letter, but her mind was set somewhat at rest long before that time by the Ambassador himself, who had learned through his confrÈre in Berlin that Mr. and Mrs. Kean were safe and at large, although not allowed to leave Berlin.

The daughter was so accustomed to her parents being in dangerous places that she did not feel so concerned about them as an ordinary girl would have felt for ordinary parents. Ever since she could remember, they had been camping in out-of-the-way places and making hair-breadth escapes from mountain wild cats and native uprisings and what not. She could not believe the Germans, whom she had always thought of as rather bovine, could turn into raging lions so completely.

“Bobby will light on his feet!” she kept saying to herself until it became almost like a prayer. “No one could hurt Mamma. She will be protected just as children will be!” And then came terrible, exaggerated accounts of the murder in cold blood of little children, and then the grim truth of the destruction of Louvain and Rheims, and anything seemed possible.

“A nation that could glory in the destruction of such beautiful things as these cathedrals will stop at nothing.” But still she kept on saying: “Bobby will light on his feet! Bobby will light on his feet!” She no longer trusted the Germans, but she had infinite faith in the sagacity and cleverness of her father. He always had got himself out of difficult and tight places and he always would.

In the meantime, money was getting very low. Try as she would to economize, excitement made her hungry and she must eat and eat three times a day.

“If I only had Molly Brown’s skill and could cook for myself!” she would groan as she tried to choke down the muddy concoction that she had just succeeded in brewing and was endeavoring to persuade herself tasted a little like coffee. She remembered with swimming eyes the beautiful little repasts they had had in the Bents’ studio during that memorable winter.

“Judy Kean, you big boob! I believe my soul you are going to bawl about a small matter of food. If the destruction of Louvain did not make you weep, surely muddy coffee ought not to bring tears to your eyes, unless maybe they are tears of shame.”

The truth of the matter was, Judy was lonesome and idle. She could not make up her mind to paint. Things were moving too fast and there was too much reality in the air. Art seemed unreal and unnecessary, somehow. “Great things will be painted after the war but not now,” she would say. She carried her camera with her wherever she went and snapped up groups of women and children, soldiers kissing their old fathers, great ladies stopping to converse with the gamin of the street; anything and everything went into her camera. She spent more money on films than on food, in spite of her healthy hunger.

On that morning in September as she cleared away the scraps from her meager breakfast, her eyes swimming from lonesomeness, appetite unappeased and a kind of nameless longing, she almost determined to throw herself on the mercy of the American Legation for funds to return to New York. The Americans had cleared out of Paris until there were very few left. Judy would occasionally see the familiar face of some art student she had known in the class, but those familiar faces grew less and less frequent.

“There’s the Marquise! I can always go to her, but I know she is taken up with her grief over Philippe’s going a soldiering,” she thought as she put her plate and cup back on the shelf where the Bents kept their assortment of china.

A knock at the door! Who could it be? No mail came to her and no friends were left to come.

“Mam’selle!” and bowing low before her was the lean old partner of St. Cloud, PÈre Tricot. “Mam’selle, my good wife and I, as well as our poor little daughter-in-law, we all want you to come and make one of our humble menage.”

“Want me!” exclaimed Judy, her eyes shining.

“Yes, Mam’selle,” he said simply. “We have talked it over and we think you are too young to be so much alone and then if—the—the—well, I have too much respect for Mam’selle to call their name,—if they do get in Paris, I can protect you with my own women. I am not so old that I cannot hit many a lick yet—indeed, I would enlist again if they would have me; but my good wife says they may need me more here in Paris and I must rest tranquilly here and do the work for France that I can best do. Will you come, Mam’selle?”

“Come! Oh, PÈre Tricot, I’ll be too glad to come. When?”

“Immediately!”

Judy’s valise was soon packed and the studio carefully locked, the key handed over to the concierge, and she was arm in arm with her old friend on her way to her new home in the little shop on the Boulevarde Montparnasse.

MÈre Tricot, who looked like a member of the Commune but acted like a dear, kindly old Granny, took the girl to her bosom.

“What did I tell you? I knew she would come,” she cried to her husband, who had hurried into the shop to wait on a customer. It was a delicatessen shop and very appetizing did the food look to poor Judy, who felt as though she had never eaten in her life.

“Tell me!” he exclaimed as he weighed out cooked spinach to a small child who wanted two sous’ worth. “Tell me, indeed! You said Mam’selle would not walk on the street with an old peasant in a faded blouse if she would come at all, and I—I said Mam’selle was what the Americans call a good sport and would walk on the street with an old peasant, if she liked him, in any kind of clothes he happened to be in, rags even. Bah! You were wrong and I was right.”

The old Tricots were forever wrangling but it was always in a semi-humorous manner, and their great devotion to each other was always apparent. Judy found it was better never to take sides with either one as the moment she did both of them were against her.

How homelike the little apartment was behind the shops! It consisted of two bed rooms, a living room which opened into the shop and a tiny tiled kitchen about the size of a kitchen on a dining car—so tiny that it seemed a miracle that all the food displayed so appetizingly in the windows and glass cases of the shop should have been prepared there.

“It is so good of you to have me and I want to come more than I can say, but you must let me board with you. I couldn’t stay unless you do.”

“That is as you choose, Mam’selle,” said the old woman. “We do not want to make money on you, but you can pay for your keep if you want to.”

“All right, Mother, but I must help some, help in the shop or mind the baby, clean up the apartment, anything! I can’t cook a little bit, but I can do other things.”

“No woman can cook,” asserted old Tricot. “They lack the touch.”

“Ah! Braggart! If I lay thee out with this pastry board, I’ll not lack the touch,” laughed the wife. She was making wonderful little tarts with crimped edges to be filled with assortments of confiture.

“Let me mind the shop, then. I know I can do that.”

“Well, that will not be bad,” agreed old Tricot. “While Marie (the daughter-in-law) washes the linen and you make the tarts, Mam’selle can keep the shop, but no board must she pay. I’ll be bound new customers will flock to us to buy of the pretty face.” Judy blushed with pleasure at the old peasant’s compliment.

“And thou, laggard and sloth! What will thou do while the women slave?”

“I—Oh, I will go to the Tabac’s to see what news there is, and later to see if Jean is to the front.”

“Well, we cannot hear from Jean to-day and Paris can still stand without thy political opinion,” but she laughed and shoved him from the shop, a very tender expression on her lined old face.

“These men! They think themselves of much importance,” she said as she resumed her pastry making.

Having tied a great linen apron around Judy’s slender waist (much slenderer in the last month from her economical living), and having instructed her in the prices of the cooked food displayed in the show cases, MÈre Tricot turned over the shop to her care. The rosy baby was lying in a wooden cradle in the back of the little shop and the grandmother was in plain view in the tiny kitchen to be seen beyond the living room.

“Well, I fancy I am almost domesticated,” thought Judy. “What an interior this would make—baby in foreground and old Mother Tricot on through with her rolling pin. Light fine! I’ve a great mind to paint while I am keeping shop, sketch, anyhow.”

She whipped out her sketch book and sketched in her motive with sure and clever strokes, but art is long and shops must be kept. Customers began to pile in. The spinach was very popular and Judy became quite an adept in dishing it out and weighing it. Potato salad was next in demand and cooked tongue and rosbif disappeared rapidly. Many soldiers lounged in, eating their sandwiches in the shop. Judy enjoyed her morning greatly but she could not remember ever in her life having worked harder.

When the tarts were finished and displayed temptingly in the window, swarms of children arrived. It seemed that MÈre Tricot’s tarts were famous in the Quarter. More soldiers came, too. Among them was a face strangely familiar to the amateur shop girl. Who could it be? It was the face of a typical Boulevardier: dissipated, ogling eyes; black moustache and beard waxed until they looked like sharp spikes; a face not homely but rather handsome, except for its expression of infinite conceit and impertinence.

“I have never seen him before, I fancy. It is just the type that is familiar to me,” she thought. “Mais quel type!”

Judy was looking very pretty, with her cheeks flushed from the excitement of weighing out spinach and salad, making change where sous were thought of as though they were gold and following the patois of the peasants that came to buy and the argot of the gamin. She had donned a white cap of Marie’s which was most becoming. Judy, always ready to act a part, with an instinctive dramatic spirit had entered into the rÔle of shop keeper with a vim that bade fair to make the Tricots’ the most popular place on Boulevarde Montparnasse. Her French had fortunately improved greatly since her arrival in Paris more than two years before and now she flattered herself that one could not tell she was not Parisienne.

The soldier with the ogling eyes and waxed moustache lingered in the shop when his companions had made their purchases and departed. He insisted upon knowing the price of every ware displayed. He asked her to name the various confitures in the tarts, which she did rather wearily as his persistence was most annoying. She went through the test, however, with as good a grace as possible. Shop girls must not be squeamish, she realized.

One particularly inviting gooseberry tart was left on the tray. Judy had had her eye on it from the first and trembled every time a purchaser came for tarts. She meant to ask MÈre Tricot for it, if only no one bought it. And now this particularly objectionable customer with his rolling black eyes and waxed moustache was asking her what kind it was! Why did he not buy what he wanted and leave?

“Eh? Qu’est-ce que c’est?” he demanded with an amused leer as he pointed a much manicured forefinger at that particularly desirable tart.

Judy was tired and the French for gooseberry left her as is the way with an acquired language. Instead of groseille which was the word she wanted, she blurted out in plain English:

“Gooseberry jam!”

“Ah, I have bean pensÈ so mooch. You may spick ze Eengleesh with me, Mees. Gueseberry jaam! Ha, ha! An’ now, Mees, there iss wan question I should lak a demandÈ of the so beootifool demoiselle: what iss the prize of wan leetle kees made in a so lufly tart?” He leaned over the counter, his eyes rolling in a fine frenzy.

Where was MÈre Tricot now? What a fine time to brandish her pastry board! Gone to the innermost recesses of the apartment with the rosy baby! Suddenly Judy remembered exactly where she had seen that silly face before.

“At Versailles, the day I got on the wrong train!” flashed through her mind. She remembered well the hateful creature who had sat on the bench by her and insulted her with his attentions. She remembered how she had jumped up from the bench and hurried off, forgetting her package of gingerbread, bought at St. Cloud, and how the would-be masher had run after her with it, saying in his insinuating manner: “You have forgot your gouter, cherie. Do you like puddeen very much, my dear?”

It was certainly the same man. His soldier’s uniform made him somewhat less of a dandy than his patent leather boots and lemon coloured gloves had done on that occasion, but the dude was there in spite of the change of clothes. On that day at Versailles she had seized the gingerbread and jammed it in her mouth, thereby disgusting the fastidious Frenchman. She had often told the story and her amused hearers had always declared that her presence of mind was much to be commended.

The soldier leaned farther and farther over the counter still demanding: “A leetle kees made in so lufly a tart.”

Ha! An inspiration! Judy grasped the desired gooseberry tart and thrust the whole thing into her mouth. There was no time to ask the leave of MÈre Tricot.

“Ah quelle betise!” exclaimed the dandy, and at the same moment he, too, remembered the young English demoiselle at Versailles. He straightened up and into his ogling eyes came a spark of shame. With a smile that changed his whole countenance he saluted Judy.

“Pardon, Mademoiselle!”

Judy’s mouth was too full to attempt French but she managed to say in her mother tongue:

“Why do you come in a respectable place like this and behave just like a Prussian?”

“Prussian! Ah, Mademoiselle, excuse, excuse. I—the beauty of the boutiquier made me forget la Patrie. I have been a rouÉ, a fool. I am henceforth a Frenchman. Mademoiselle iss wan noble ladee. She efen mar her so great beauty to protec her dignitee. I remember ze pain d’epice at Versailles and la grande bouchÉe. Mademoiselle has le bel esprit, what you call Mericanhumor. Au revoir, Mademoiselle,” and with a very humble bow he departed, without buying anything at all.

The Tricots laughed very heartily when Judy told them her experience.

“I see you can take care of yourself,” said PÈre Tricot with a nod of approval. “If the Prussians come, they had better look out.”

“Do you forgive me for eating the last gooseberry tart?” she asked of MÈre Tricot. “I was very glad of the excuse to get it before some one bought it from under my very nose.”

Mother Tricot not only forgave her but produced another one for her that she had kept back for the guest she seemed to delight to honour.

“Our boutiquier has sold out the shop,” declared the old man. “I shall have to go to market very early in the morning to get more provisions cooked.”

“Ah, another excuse for absenting thyself!”

“Oh, please, may I go with you?” begged Judy.

“It will mean very early rising, but I shall be so pleased,” said the delighted old man, and his wife smiled approval.

It was arranged that Judy was to sleep on a couch in the living room. This suited her exactly, as she was able after the family had retired to rise stealthily and open a window. The French peasant and even the middle class Parisian is as afraid of air in a bedroom as we would be of a rattlesnake. They sleep as a rule in hermetically sealed chambers and there is a superstition even among the enlightened of that city that night air will give one some peculiar affection of the eyes. How they keep as healthy as they do is a wonder to those brought up on fresh air. Judy had feared that her sleeping would have to be done in the great bed with Marie and the baby and welcomed the proposition of the couch in the living room with joy. There was a smell of delicatessen wares but it was not unpleasing to one who had been economizing in food for so many days.

“I’d rather smell spinach than American Beauties,” she said to herself, “and potato salad beats potpourri.”

Her couch was clean and the sheets smelled of lavender. Marie, the little daughter-in-law, had been a blanchisseuse de fin before she became the bride of Jean Tricot. She still plied her trade on the family linen and everything she touched was snow white and beautifully ironed. The clothes were carried by her to the public laundry; there she washed them and then brought them home to iron.

As Judy lay on the soft, clean couch, sniffing the mingled smells of shop and kitchen and fresh sheets, she thanked her stars that she was not alone in the Bents’ studio, wondering what she was to do about breakfast and a little nervous at every sound heard during the night.

Even the bravest feels a little squeamish when absolutely alone through the long night. Judy was brave, her father’s own daughter, but those nights alone in the studio in Rue Brea had got on her nerves. It was just so much harder because of the gay, jolly winter spent in the place.

expressed her sentiments exactly. Once she dreamed that Molly Brown was standing over her with a cup of hot coffee, which was one of Molly’s ways. She was always spoiling people and often would appear at the bed side with matutinal coffee. The dream came after a particularly lonesome evening. She thought that as Molly stood over her, her hand shook and some of the coffee splashed on her face. She awoke with a start to find her face wet with hot tears.

Here at the Tricots, life was quite different. MÈre and PÈre Tricot were playing a happy duet through the night with comfortable snores. Marie could be heard cooing to her baby as she nursed it and the baby making inarticulate gurgles of joy at being nourished. The feeling of having human beings near by was most soothing. Judy did not mind the snores, but rejoiced in them. Even when the baby cried, as it did once in the night, she smiled happily.

“I am one of a family!” she exclaimed.