suited Eustacie much better than the stitching, and
best of all she liked to be sent with Maitre Isaac to some cottage where
solace for soul and body were needed, and the inmate was too ill to be
brought to Madame la Duchess. She was learning much and improving too
in the orderly household, but her wanderings had made her something of a
little gipsy. She now and then was intolerably weary, and felt as if
she had been entirely spoilt for her natural post. 'What would become
of her,' she said to Maitre Isaac, 'if she were too grand to dress
Rayonette?'

She was not greatly distressed that the Montauban pursuivant turned out
to have only the records of the Provencal nobility, and was forced to
communicate with his brethren at Bordeaux before he could bring down
the Ribaumont genealogy to the actual generation; and so slow was
communication, so tardy the mode of doing everything, that the chestnut
leaves were falling and autumn becoming winter before the blazoned
letter showed Ribaumont, de Picardie--'Gules, fretty or, a canton of
the last, a leopard, sable. Eustacie Berangere, m. Annora, daughter
and heiress of Villiam, Baron of Valvem, in the county of Dorisette,
England, who beareth, azure, a siren regardant in a mirror proper.' The
siren was drawn in all her propriety impaled with the leopard, and she
was so much more comprehensible than the names, to both Madame de Quinet
and Eustacie, that it was a pity they could not direct their letters to
her rather than to 'Le Baron de Valvem,' whose cruel W's perplexed them
so much. However, the address was the least of Eustacie's troubles; she
should be only too glad when she got to that, and she was sitting in
Maitre Isaac's room, trying to make him dictate her sentences and asking
him how to spell every third word, when the dinner-bell rang, and the
whole household dropped down from _salon_, library, study, or chamber to
the huge hall, with its pavement of black and white marble, and its
long tables, for Madame de Quinet was no woman to discard wholesome old
practices.

Then, as Eustacie, with Rayonette trotting at her side, and Maitre Isaac
leaning on her arm, slowly made her way to that high table where dined
Madame la Duchess, her grandsons, the ministers, the gentlemen in
waiting, and some three or four women besides herself, she saw that
the lower end of the great hall was full of silks, cloths, and ribbons
heaped together; and, passing by the lengthy rank of retainers,