so much
her elder.

"I am going now to my father," she said, "and to my other mother."

"A second marriage," thought Mr. Raleigh, "and before the orphan's
crapes are"--Then, fearful lest she should read his thought, he
added,--"And how do you speak such perfect English?"

"Oh, my father came to see us every other year, and I have written home
twice a week since I was a little child. Mamma, too, spoke as much
English as French."

"I have not been in America for a long time," said Mr. Raleigh, after a
few steps. "But I do not doubt that you will find enjoyment there. It
will be new: womanhood will have little like youth for you; but, in
every event, it is well to add to our experience, you know."

"What is it like, Sir? But I know! Rows of houses, very counterparts of
rows of houses, and they of rows of houses yet beyond. Just the
toy-villages in boxes, uniform as graves and ugly as bricks"--

"Brick houses are not such ugly things. I remember one, low and wide,
possessed of countless gables, covered with vines and shaded with
sycamores; it could not have been so picturesque, if built of the marble
of Paros, and gleaming temple-white through masks of verdure."

"It seems to me that I, too, remember such a one," said she, dreamily.
"_Mais non, je m'y perds_. Yet, for all that, I shall not find the New
York avenues lined with them."

"No; the houses there are palaces."

"I suppose, then, I am to live in a palace," she answered, with a light
tinkling laugh. "That is fine; but one may miss the verandas, all the
whiteness and coolness. How one must feel the roof!"

"Roofs should be screens, and not prisons, not shells, you think?" said
Mr. Raleigh.

"At home," she replied, "our houses are, so to say, parasols; in those
cities they must be iron shrouds. _Ainsi soit il!_" she added, and
shrugged her shoulders like a little fatalist.

"You must not take it with such desperation; perhaps you will not be
obliged to wear the shroud."

"Not long, to be sure, at first. We go to freeze in the country, a place
with distant hills of blue ice, my old nurse told me,--old Ursule. Oh,
Sir, she was drowned! I saw the very wave that swept her off!"

"That was your servant?"

"Yes."

"Then, perhaps, I have some good news for you. She was tall and large?"

"_Oui_."

"Her name was Ursule?"

"_Oui! je dis que oui!_"

Mr. Raleigh laughed at her eagerness. "She is below, then," he
said,--"not drowned. There is Reynolds. M