le a few perfunctory questions and answers were passing between
Miss Lyster and her companion. Mary's aspect as she talked was extremely
amiable; one might have called it indulgent, perhaps even by an
adjective that implied a yet further shade of delicate superiority.
Kitty met it by the same "grand manner" that Ashe had several times
observed in her, a manner caught perhaps from some French model, and
caricatured in the taking. Her eyes meanwhile took note of Mary's face
and dress, and while she listened her small teeth tormented her
under-lip, as though she restrained impatience. All at once in the midst
of some information that Miss Lyster was lucidly giving, Kitty made an
impetuous turn. She had caught some words on the farther side of the
room; and she looked hard, eagerly, at the speaker.

"Who is that?" she inquired.

Mary Lyster, with a sharp sense of interruption, replied that she
believed the lady in question was the Grosville's French governess. But
in the very midst of her sentence Kitty deserted her, left her standing
in the centre of the drawing-room, while the deserter fled across it,
and sinking down beside the astonished mademoiselle took the
Frenchwoman's hand by assault and held it in both her own.

"Vous parlez Francais?--vous etes Francaise? Ah! ca me fait tant de
bien! Voyons! voyons!--causons un peu!"

And bending forward, she broke into a cataract of French, all the
elements of her strange, small beauty rushing, as it were, into flame
and movement at the swift sound and cadence of the words, like a dancer
kindled by music. The occasion was of the slightest; the Frenchwoman
might well show a natural bewilderment. But into the slight occasion the
girl threw an animation, a passion, that glorified it. It was like the
leap of a wild rain-stream on the mountains, that pours into the first
channel which presents itself.

"What beautiful French!" said Lady Edith, softly, to Mary Lyster, who
had found a seat beside her.

Mary Lyster smiled.

"She has been at school, of course, in a French convent." Somehow the
tone implied that the explanation disposed of all merit in the
performance.

"I am afraid these French convent schools are not at all what they
should be," said Lady Grosville.

And rising to a pyramidal height, her ample moire dress swelling behind
her, her gray head magnificently crowned by its lace cap and black
velvet <i>bandeau</i>, she swept across the room to where the Dean's wife