at her.
"She is going out in her carriage." "She is dressed all in black velvet
and splendid fur." "That is her own, own, carriage." "She has millions of
money; and she can have anything she wants--Jane says so!" "She is very
pretty, too; but she is so pale and has such big, sorrowful, black eyes.
I should not be sorrowful if I were in her place; but Jane says the
servants say she is always quiet and looks sad." "Her maid says she lived
with her aunt, and her aunt made her too religious."

She rarely lifted her large dark eyes to look at them with any curiosity.
She was not accustomed to the society of children. She had never had a
child companion in her life, and these little Americans, who were so very
rosy and gay, and who went out to walk or drive with groups of brothers
and sisters, and even ran in the street, laughing and playing and
squabbling healthily--these children amazed her.

Poor little Saint Elizabeth! She had not lived a very natural or healthy
life herself, and she knew absolutely nothing of real childish pleasures.
You see, it had occurred in this way: When she was a baby of two years
her young father and mother died, within a week of each other, of a
terrible fever, and the only near relatives the little one had were her
Aunt Clotilde and Uncle Bertrand. Her Aunt Clotilde lived in
Normandy--her Uncle Bertrand in New York. As these two were her only
guardians, and as Bertrand de Rochemont was a gay bachelor, fond of
pleasure and knowing nothing of babies, it was natural that he should be
very willing that his elder sister should undertake the rearing and
education of the child.

"Only," he wrote to Mademoiselle de Rochemont, "don't end by training her
for an abbess, my dear Clotilde."

[Illustration: "THERE SHE IS," THEY WOULD CRY.]

There was a very great difference between these two people--the distance
between the gray stone _chateau_ in Normandy and the brown stone mansion
in New York was not nearly so great as the distance and difference
between the two lives. And yet it was said that in her first youth
Mademoiselle de Rochemont had been as gay and fond of pleasure as either
of her brothers. And then, when her life was at its brightest and
gayest--when she was a beautiful and brilliant young woman--she had had a
great and bitter sorrow, which had changed her for ever. From that time
she had never left the house in which she had been born, and had lived
the life of a nun in everything but bei