tence_.
Then Miss Foster came; madame vanished without leave-taking, as if
liable to reappear at any instant, and lessons lapsed back into leisure.
Bessie felt that she had been an innocent scapegrace, and Harry very
venturesome; but she had so much enjoyed her "treat," and felt so much
the happier for it, that, all madame's grave displeasure
notwithstanding, she never was properly sorry.

Harry Musgrave returned to England as jubilant as he left Bessie. The
trip, winter though it was, exhilarated him. But it behooved him to be
serious when Mr. Carnegie was angry, and Mrs. Carnegie declared that she
did not know how to forgive him. If his escapade were made known to Mr.
Fairfax, the upshot might be a refusal to let Bessie revisit them at
Beechhurst throughout the whole continuance of her school-days. And that
was what came of it. Of course his escapade was communicated to Mr.
Fairfax, and Madame Fournier received a letter from Abbotsmead with the
intimation that the youth who had presented himself in the Rue St. Jean
as a cousin of Miss Fairfax was nothing akin to her, and that if she
could not be secured from his presumptuous intrusions there, she must be
removed from madame's custody. They had associated together as children,
but it was desirable to stay the progress of their unequal friendship as
they grew up; for the youth, though well conducted and clever, was of
mean origin and poor condition; so Mr. Fairfax was credibly informed.
And he trusted that Madame Fournier would see the necessity of a
decisive separation between them.

Madame did see the necessity. With Mr. Fairfax's letter came to her
hand another, a letter from the "youth" himself, but addressed to his
dear Bessie. That it should ever reach her was improbable. There was the
strictest quarantine for letters in the Rue St. Jean. Even letters to
and from parents passed through madame's private office. She opened and
read Harry Musgrave's as an obvious necessity, smiled over its boyish
exaggeration, and relished its fun at her own expense, for madame was a
woman of wisdom and humor. Little by little she had learnt the whole of
Bessie's life and conversation from her own lips; and she felt that
there was nothing to be feared from a lover of young Musgrave's type,
unless he was set on mischief by the premature interposition of
obstacles, of which this denial to Bessie of her Christmas holiday was
an example.

However, madame had not to judge, but to act.