ped her charge this critic rushed off to her father's, reflecting
with pleasure that at that hour she should probably find her sister
Marguerite there. Mme. de Cliche was with their parent in fact--she had
three days in the week for coming to the Cours la Reine; she sat near
him in the firelight, telling him presumably her troubles, for,
Maxime de Cliche having proved not quite the pearl they had originally
supposed, Mme. de Brecourt knew what Marguerite did whenever she took
that little ottoman and drew it close to the paternal chair: she gave
way to her favourite vice, that of dolefulness, which lengthened her
long face more: it was unbecoming if she only knew it. The family was
intensely united, as we see; but that didn't prevent Mme. de Brecourt's
having a certain sympathy for Maxime: he too was one of themselves,
and she asked herself what SHE would have done had she been a
well-constituted man with a wife whose cheeks were like decks in a high
sea. It was the twilight hour in the winter days, before the lamps, that
especially brought her out; then she began her long stories about her
complicated cares, to which her father listened with angelic patience.
Mme. de Brecourt liked his particular room in the old house in the Cours
la Reine; it reminded her of her mother's life and her young days and
her dead brother and the feelings connected with her first going into
the world. Alphonse and she had had an apartment, by her father's
kindness, under the roof that covered in associations as the door of a
linen-closet preserves herbaceous scents, so that she continued to pop
in and out, full of her fresh impressions of society, just as she had
done when she was a girl. She broke into her sister's confidences now;
she announced her trouvaille and did battle for it bravely.

Five days later--there had been lively work in the meantime; Gaston
turned so pale at moments that she feared it would all result in a
mortal illness for him, and Marguerite shed gallons of tears--Mr.
Probert went to see the Dossons with his son. Mme. de Brecourt paid them
another visit, a real official affair as she deemed it, accompanied by
her husband; and the Baron de Douves and his wife, written to by Gaston,
by his father and by Margaret and Susan, came up from the country full
of anxious participation. M. de Douves was the person who took the
family, all round, most seriously and who most deprecated any sign of
crude or precipitate action. He was a