erce had its romance. Strange
things and stranger stories came back from far Indian seas.

After this introduction, he thanked his instructor, and returning to the
counting-house, was gravely welcomed and asked to put in French two long
letters for Martinique and to translate and write out others. He went
away for his noonday meal, and, returning, wrote and copied and
resolutely rewrote, asking what this and that term of commerce meant,
until his back ached when he went home at six. He laughed as he gave his
mother a humorous account of it all, but not of the sweeping.

Then she declared the claret good, and what did it cost? Oh, not much.
He had not the bill as yet.

VI

Despite the disgust he felt at the routine of daily domestic service,
the life of the great merchant's business began more and more to
interest De Courval. The clerks were mere machines, and of Mr. Wynne he
saw little. He went in and laid letters on his desk, answered a question
or two in regard to his mother, and went out with perhaps a message to a
shipmaster fresh from the Indies and eager to pour out in a tongue well
spiced with sea oaths his hatred of England and her ocean bullies.

The mother's recovery was slow, as Chovet had predicted, but at the end
of June, on a Saturday, he told Mistress Wynne she might call on his
patient, and said that in the afternoon the vicomtesse might sit out on
the balcony upon which her room opened.

Madame was beginning to desire a little change of society and was
somewhat curious as to this old spinster of whom Rene had given a kind,
if rather startling, account. Her own life in England had been lonely
and amid those who afforded her no congenial society, nor as yet was she
in entirely easy and satisfactory relations with the people among whom
she was now thrown. They were to her both new and singular.

The Quaker lady puzzled her inadequate experience--a _dame de pension_,
a boarding-house keeper with perfect tact; with a certain simple
sweetness, as if any common bit of service about the room and the sick
woman's person were a pleasure. The quiet, gentle manners of the Quaker
household, with now and then a flavor of some larger world, were all to
Madame's taste. When, by and by, her hostess talked more and more freely
in her imperfect French, it was unobtrusive and natural, and she found
her own somewhat austere training beginning to yield and her unready
heart to open to kindness so constant, and