nds of the hartstongue, and the delicate drooping trichomanes;
the fine timber, and the picturesque farmhouses with their thatched
roofs nestling in the valleys--all tend to give a home-like English air
to the scenery of Normandy. And the district in which the Chateau de
Thorens stands possesses all these attractions for an English eye. Not
that any English people lived in the chateau; the De Thorens were
French, or rather Norman, to the backbone, descended from the great
duke, and proud as Lucifer of their birth. Pride and poverty are
generally supposed to go together; and though poor is perhaps hardly the
word to apply to people who could afford to live in the ease and luxury
which prevailed at Chateau de Thorens, yet for their rank the De Thorens
were not rich, and, consequently, after the fashion of many French
families, there were three generations of them now all living under the
ancestral roof.

First there was the old baroness, a picturesque old lady with very white
hair and piercing black eyes, with whom we have very little to do; then
there was her eldest son, the present baron, for his father had been
dead some years, and his beautiful young wife, whom he was so
passionately fond of that he was jealous--dreadfully jealous--of her
love for her baby, a little girl a few months old; and, lastly, there
were the baron's three younger brothers, who with Pere Yvon, the
chaplain, made up the family party. The two younger brothers were mere
boys, still under Pere Yvon's charge, for he acted as tutor to them as
well as chaplain; but Leon de Thorens was a young man of
five-and-twenty, only a year or two younger than the baron. He was a
fine, handsome man, tall and thin, with his mother's fine black eyes and
small well-cut nose and mouth. He was of a bold, reckless nature, full
of animal spirits, the very life of the house when he was at home, which
was seldom, as he owned a yacht, in which he spent a great deal of his
time. He was his mother's favourite son, and both he and she had often
privately regretted that he was not the eldest.

The baron was smaller and fairer than Leon, and not so handsome, though
there was a strong family likeness between the brothers. He was of a
quieter disposition, and his restlessness took an intellectual rather
than a physical form, his wanderings being confined to the shelves of
the valuable library which the chateau boasted, instead of extending
over the seas on which Leon spent so muc