ind. It was so cheerful and secluded, looking out from
the garden over the wide space beyond to the changeful sea, that
since Madame Landresse's death the Sieur de Mauprat had made it
reception-room, dining-room, and kitchen all in one. He would willingly
have slept there too, but noblesse oblige and the thought of what the
Chevalier Orvilliers du Champsavoys de Beaumanoir might think prevented
him. Moreover, there was something patriarchal in a kitchen as a
reception-room; and both he and the chevalier loved to watch Guida busy
with her household duties: at one moment her arms in the dough of the
kneading trough; at another picking cherries for a jelly, or casting up
her weekly accounts with a little smiling and a little sighing.

If, by chance, it had been proposed by the sieur to adjourn to the small
sitting-room which looked out upon the Place du Vier Prison, a gloom
would instantly have settled upon them both; though in this little front
room there was an ancient arm-chair, over which hung the sword that
the Comte Guilbert Mauprat de Chambery had used at Fontenoy against the
English.

So it was that this spacious kitchen, with its huge chimney, and paved
with square flagstones and sanded, became like one of those ancient
corners of camaraderie in some exclusive inn where gentlemen of quality
were wont to meet. At the left of the chimney was the great settle, or
veille, covered with baize, "flourished" with satinettes, and spread
with ferns and rushes, and above it a little shelf of old china worth
the ransom of a prince at least. Opposite the doorway were two great
armchairs, one for the sieur and the other for the Chevalier, who made
his home in the house of one Elie Mattingley, a fisherman by trade and
by practice a practical smuggler, with a daughter Carterette whom he
loved passing well.

These, with a few constant visitors, formed a coterie: the huge,
grizzly-bearded boatman, Jean Touzel, who wore spectacles, befriended
smugglers, was approved of all men, and secretly worshipped by his wife;
Amice Ingouville, the fat avocat with a stomach of gigantic proportions,
the biggest heart and the tiniest brain in the world; Maitre Ranulph
Delagarde, and lastly M. Yves Savary dit Detricand, that officer of
Rullecour's who, being released from the prison hospital, when the hour
came for him to leave the country was too drunk to find the shore. By
some whim of negligence the Royal Court was afterwards too lethargic to