closed behind him, Mme. la Duchesse took
her spectacles off from her high-bred nose and gave a little sniff,
which caused Mademoiselle Crystal to look up from her book and mutely to
question Madame with those wonderful blue eyes of hers.

"Ah ca, my little Crystal," was Madame's tart response to that eloquent
enquiry, "does Monsieur my brother imagine himself to be a second
Bourbon king, throning it in the Tuileries and granting audiences to the
ladies of his court? or is it only for my edification that he plays this
magnificent game of etiquette and ceremonial and other stupid
paraphernalia which have set me wondering since last night? M. le Comte
will receive Mme. la Duchesse in a quarter of an hour forsooth," she
added, mimicking Hector's pompous manner; "_par Dieu!_ I should think
indeed that he would receive his own sister when and where it suited her
convenience--not his."

Crystal was silent for a moment or two: and in those same expressive
eyes which she kept fixed on Madame's face, the look of mute enquiry had
become more insistent. It almost seemed as if she were trying to
penetrate the underlying thoughts of the older woman, as if she tried to
read all that there was in that kindly glance of hidden sarcasm, of
humour or tolerance, or of gentle contempt. Evidently what she read in
the wrinkled face and the twinkling eyes pleased and reassured her, for
now the suspicion of a smile found its way round the corners of her
sensitive mouth.

There are some very old people living in Grenoble at the present day
whose mothers or fathers have told them that they remembered
Mademoiselle Crystal de Cambray quite well in the year that M. le Comte
returned from England and once more took possession of his ancestral
home on the bank of the Isere, which those awful Terrorists of '92 had
taken away from him. Louis XVIII., the Benevolent king, had promptly
restored the old chateau to its rightful owner, when he himself, after
years of exile, mounted the throne of his fathers, and the usurper
Bonaparte was driven out of France by the armies of Europe allied
against him, and sent to cool his ambitions in the island fastnesses of
Elba.

Mademoiselle de Cambray was just nineteen in that year 1814 which was so
full of grace for the Bourbon dynasty and all its faithful adherents,
and in February of the following year she attained her twentieth
birthday. Of course you know that she was born in England, and that her
mother was Eng