They would be waiting for him to serve the soup, and the young man would seat himself between the widow and the two orphans.
Alas, how hard these poor ladies' lives had become! Damourette, a member of the Institute, remembered that he had once joked in the studios with Gerard, and obtained a small annual pension for the widow; but it was charity--hardly enough to pay the rent.

Fortunately Louise, who already looked like an old maid at twenty-three, going about the city all day with her roll of music under her black shawl, had many pupils, and more than twenty houses had well-nigh become uninhabitable through her exertions with little girls, whose red hands made an unendurable racket with their chromatic scales.

Louise's earnings constituted the surest part of their revenue.

What a strange paradox is the social life in large cities, where Weber's Last Waltz will bring the price of a four-pound loaf of bread, and one pays the grocer with the proceeds of Boccherini's Minuet! In spite of all, they had hard work to make both ends meet at the Gerards.

The pretty Maria wished to make herself useful and aid her mother and sister.