r smiling, and, on
the contrary, looking rather ruefully at her feet.

'Weel you make a some tea? When I come back, dear Mary Quince, I 'av so
much to tell you and dear Miss Maud of all my adventures while I 'av been
away; it will make a you laugh ever so much. I was--what you theenk?--near,
ever so near to be married!' And upon this she broke into a screeching
laugh, and shook Mary Quince merrily by the shoulder.

I sullenly declined going out, or rising; and when she had gone away, I
told Mary that I should confine myself to my room while Madame stayed.

But self-denying ordinances self-imposed are not always long observed by
youth. Madame de la Rougierre laid herself out to be agreeable; she had no
end of stories--more than half, no doubt, pure fictions--to tell, but all,
in that triste place, amusing. Mary Quince began to entertain a better
opinion of her. She actually helped to make beds, and tried to be in
every way of use, and seemed to have quite turned over a new leaf; and so
gradually she moved me, first to listen, and at last to talk.

On the whole, these terms were better than a perpetual skirmish; but,
notwithstanding all her gossip and friendliness, I continued to have a
profound distrust and even terror of her.

She seemed curious about the Bartram-Haugh family, and all their ways, and
listened darkly when I spoke. I told her, bit by bit, the whole story of
Dudley, and she used, whenever there was news of the Seamew, to read the
paragraph for my benefit; and in poor Milly's battered little Atlas she
used to trace the ship's course with a pencil, writing in, from point to
point, the date at which the vessel was 'spoken' at sea. She seemed amused
at the irrepressible satisfaction with which I received these minutes of
his progress; and she used to calculate the distance;--on such a day he was
two hundred and sixty miles, on such another five hundred; the last point
was more than eight hundred--good, better, best--best of all would be those
'deleecious antipode, w'ere he would so soon promener on his head twelve
thousand mile away;' and at the conceit she would fall into screams of
laughter.

Laugh as she might, however, there was substantial comfort in thinking
of the boundless stretch of blue wave that rolled between me and that
villainous cousin.

I was now on very odd terms with Madame. She had not relapsed into her
favourite vein of oracular sarcasm and menace; she had, on the contrary,
affected