Little Saint Elizabeth

She had not been brought up in America at all. She had been born in
France, in a beautiful _château_, and she had been born heiress to a
great fortune, but, nevertheless, just now she felt as if she was very
poor, indeed. And yet her home was in one of the most splendid houses in
New York. She had a lovely suite of apartments of her own, though she was
only eleven years old. She had had her own carriage and a saddle horse, a
train of masters, and governesses, and servants, and was regarded by all
the children of the neighborhood as a sort of grand and mysterious little
princess, whose incomings and outgoings were to be watched with the
greatest interest.

"There she is," they would cry, flying to their windows to look at her.
"She is going out in her carriage." "She is dressed all in black velvet
and splendid fur." "That is her own, own, carriage." "She has millions of
money; and she can have anything she wants--Jane says so!" "She is very
pretty, too; but she is so pale and has such big, sorrowful, black eyes.
I should not be sorrowful if I were in her place; but Jane says the
servants say she is always quiet and looks sad." "Her maid says she lived
with her aunt, and her aunt made her too religious."

She rarely lifted her large dark eyes to look at them with any curiosity.
She was not accustomed to the society of children. She had never had a
child companion in her life, and these little Americans, who were so very
rosy and gay, and who went out to walk or drive with groups of brothers
and sisters, and even ran in the street, laughing and playing and
squabbling healthily--these children amazed her.

Poor little Saint Elizabeth! She had not lived a very natural or healthy
life herself, and she knew absolutely nothing of real childish pleasures.
You see, it had occurred in this way: When she was a baby of two years
her young father and mother died, within a week of each other, of a
terrible fever, and the only near relatives the little one had were her
Aunt Clotilde and Uncle Bertrand. Her Aunt Clotilde lived in
Normandy--her Uncle Bertrand in New York. As these two were her only
guardians, and as Bertrand de Rochemont was a gay bachelor, fond of
pleasure and knowing nothing of babies, it was natural that he should be
very willing that his elder sister should undertake the rearing and
education of the child.

"Only," he wrote to Mademoiselle de Rochemont, "don't end by training her
for an abbess, my dear Clotilde."

There was a very great difference between these two people--the distance
between the gray stone _château_ in Normandy and the brown stone mansion
in New York was not nearly so great