handkerchief; then she ate a crust of bread she had put in her basket,
and consoled herself by looking at the bird.

Arriving at the top of Ecquemanville, she saw the lights of Honfleur
shining in the distance like so many stars; further on, the ocean spread
out in a confused mass. Then a weakness came over her; the misery of her
childhood, the disappointment of her first love, the departure of her
nephew, the death of Virginia; all these things came back to her at
once, and, rising like a swelling tide in her throat, almost choked her.

Then she wished to speak to the captain of the vessel, and without
stating what she was sending, she gave him some instructions.

Fellacher kept the parrot a long time. He always promised that it would
be ready for the following week; after six months he announced the
shipment of a case, and that was the end of it. Really, it seemed as
if Loulou would never come back to his home. "They have stolen him,"
thought Felicite.

Finally he arrived, sitting bold upright on a branch which could be
screwed into a mahogany pedestal, with his foot in the air, his head on
one side, and in his beak a nut which the naturalist, from love of the
sumptuous, had gilded. She put him in her room.

This place, to which only a chosen few were admitted, looked like a
chapel and a second-hand shop, so filled was it with devotional and
heterogeneous things. The door could not be opened easily on account of
the presence of a large wardrobe. Opposite the window that looked out
into the garden, a bull's-eye opened on the yard; a table was placed by
the cot and held a wash-basin, two combs, and a piece of blue soap in