Charlotte was sometimes excited sufficiently to speak eloquently and
well--on certain subjects; but before her tongue was thus loosened, she
had a habit of gradually wheeling round on her chair, so as almost to
conceal her face from the person to whom she was speaking.

And yet there was much in Brussels to strike a responsive chord in her
powerful imagination. At length she was seeing somewhat of that grand
old world of which she had dreamed. As the gay crowds passed by her, so
had gay crowds paced those streets for centuries, in all their varying
costumes. Every spot told an historic tale, extending back into the
fabulous ages when Jan and Jannika, the aboriginal giant and giantess,
looked over the wall, forty feet high, of what is now the Rue Villa
Hermosa, and peered down upon the new settlers who were to turn them out
of the country in which they had lived since the deluge. The great
solemn Cathedral of St. Gudule, the religious paintings, the striking
forms and ceremonies of the Romish Church--all made a deep impression on
the girls, fresh from the bare walls and simple worship of Haworth
Church. And then they were indignant with themselves for having been
susceptible of this impression, and their stout Protestant hearts arrayed
themselves against the false Duessa that had thus imposed upon them.

The very building they occupied as pupils, in Madame Heger's pensionnat,
had its own ghostly train of splendid associations, marching for ever, in
shadowy procession, through and through the ancient rooms, and shaded
alleys of the gardens. From the splendour of to-day in the Rue Royale,
if you turn aside, near the statue of the General Beliard, you look down
four flights of broad stone steps upon the Rue d'Isabelle. The chimneys
of the houses in it are below your feet. Opposite to the lowest flight
of steps, there is a large old mansion facing you, with a spacious walled
garden behind--and to the right of it. In front of this garden, on the
same side as the mansion, and with great boughs of trees sweeping over
their lowly roofs, is a row of small, picturesque, old-fashioned
cottages, not unlike, in degree and uniformity, to the almshouses so
often seen in an English country town. The Rue d'Isabelle looks as
though it had been untouched by the innovations of the builder for the
last three centuries; and yet any one might drop a stone into it from the
back windows of the grand modern hotels in the Rue Royale, buil