Eloise

by Caroline Conrad

“Miss Eloise, please, Madame requests to see you in her sitting room.”

A little girl, with black ringletted hair clustering about a fair open face, rather sad but sweet in expression, rose at once from her place in the class, at Madame Renier’s boarding school, and followed the servant from the room.

Madame met her at the door, saying, in a voice of strange compassion:

“My poor darling!”

Eloise’s dark eyes flashed pained inquiry in Madame’s solemn face.

“You have news,” she cried, in a stricken voice—”you have news of mamma! Oh, Madame, tell me!”

“Poor baby! poor little one! how can I tell thee?” Madame murmured.

“Don’t tell me that!” she cried; “don’t tell me I shall never see mamma any more—my poor, suffering, abused mamma!”

“I wish I had it not to tell thee,” Madame said sadly.

“Is she dead?” the child asked.

“Yes, dear.”

Madame bent presently to look on the little girl’s face.

“Don’t, child—don’t look like that!” Madame pleaded, shuddering. “Cry, Eloise—cry here on my bosom; it will do thee good.”

Eloise lifted her great solemn eyes to Madame’s.

“He has done it, I know; I know he has,” she said, in strange, unchildlike tones. “Mamma said I should not be sent away from her; she would teach me herself. She said it would kill her to take me from her, and it has.”

“Hush, dear; you are crazed now with grief.”

“Madame, I am not. Madame, I will tell every one I see that it was that bad man who killed her.”

“Child, you must not speak so. Eloise, try to bear it—try to be calmer. He is here; he has come to take you home with him.”

“He! the man who married my beautiful mamma only to torture the life out of her? I had rather die than go with him.”

“Child, he may come in at any moment.”

“Madame, I am not a child. I… Read More