Lizette Author:Edward Marshall Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. A DUCKING IN THE SEINE. He found a studio and two large rooms, overlooking the charming old Gardens of the Luxembourg. John Murdoch will never... more » forget the green of those swaying trees in the Gardens of the Luxembourg, nor the twittering of the birds in them, nor the faint uprising shouts of the children at play there when the sun shone, nor the high comfort of feeling himself in his own home, when the rain came down upon them or the fog rose upward from them. He used to sit at a window on stormy days and thank his good luck that the sun did not always shine out of doors. It always shone indoors, and Lizette—dainty, bewitching, devoted—was the sun. Six mornings of the week at five o'clock, she gently shook him and bade him dress for work. On a little table in the studio were his coffee and his rolls, waiting for him. He no longer yearned for the American breakfast. He ate what she gave him hastily, while she chattered gaily, unless she stopped and pretended to pucker up her forehead in a great scowl, because he ate so rapidly. "Of a certainty it is," she would say, "that some day you will choke until you die. Be not af-raid. The rolls are of the good ones. They will not taste so ver5 ter-ree-ble, if you eat them with the slowness. You are like les p'tites oiseaux over in the trees in the Gardens of the Luxembourg. When their leetle maman takes to them the worm—the g-r-e-a-t b-e-e-g wo-r-r-r-m—les p'tites oiseaux eat it so much in the haste that there can be no happiness at all for the poor maman oiseau. She mus' sit upon the nest's outside, an' wonder if les p'tites oiseaux will die of it. An' so it is wiz you. You devour the rollan' coffee with such great haste that I sit by an' have the worry in the heart of me, for fear that I shall soon be all alone beca...« less