e defiled into the Green Saloon, I bringing
up the rear meekly. On the table were fruit and flowers, and one small
bottle of some light wine. The butler filled her ladyship's glass, and
then withdrew.

"You can take a pear, little girl," said Lady Chillington. Accordingly I
took a pear, but when I had got it I was too timid to eat it, and could
do nothing but hold it between my hot palms. Had I been at Park Hill
Seminary, I should soon have made my teeth meet in the fruit; but I was
not certain as to the proper mode of eating pears in society.

Lady Chillington placed her glass in her eye and examined me critically.

"Haie! haie!" she said. "That good Chinfeather has not quite eradicated
our gaucherie, it seems. We are deficient in ease and aplomb. What is
the name of that Frenchwoman, Agnes, who 'finished' Lady Kinbuck's
girls?"

"You mean Madame Delclos."

"The same. Look out her address to-morrow, and remind me that you write
to her. If mademoiselle here remain in England, she will grow up weedy,
and will never learn to carry her shoulders properly. Besides, the child
has scarcely two words to say for herself. A little Parisian training
may prove beneficial. At her age a French girl of family would be a
little duchess in bearing and manners, even though she had never been
outside the walls of her pension. How is such an anomaly to be accounted
for? It is possible that the atmosphere may have something to do with
it."

Here was fresh food for wonder, and for such serious thought as my age
admitted of. I was to be sent to a school in France! I could not make up
my mind whether to be sorry or glad. In truth, I was neither wholly the
one nor the other; the tangled web of my feelings was something
altogether beyond my skill to unravel.

Lady Chillington sipped her wine absently awhile; Sister Agnes was busy
with some fine needlework; and I was striving to elaborate a giant and
his attendant dwarf out of the glowing embers and cavernous recesses of
the wood fire, while there was yet an underlying vein of thought at work
in my mind which busied itself desultorily with trying to piece together
all that I had ever heard or read of life in a French school.

"You can run away now, little girl. You are de trop," said her ladyship,
turning on me in her abrupt fashion. "And you, Agnes, may as well read
to me a couple of chapters out of the 'Girondins.' What a wonderful man
was that Robespierre! What a giant! Had he but li