“Only,” he wrote to Mademoiselle de Rochemont, “don’t end by training her for an abbess, my dear Clotilde.”

[Illustration:  “There she is,” They would cry.]

There was a very great difference between these two people—­the distance between the gray stone chateau in Normandy and the brown stone mansion in New York was not nearly so great as the distance and difference between the two lives.  And yet it was said that in her first youth Mademoiselle de Rochemont had been as gay and fond of pleasure as either of her brothers.  And then, when her life was at its brightest and gayest—­when she was a beautiful and brilliant young woman—­she had had a great and bitter sorrow, which had changed her for ever.  From that time she had never left the house in which she had been born, and had lived the life of a nun in everything but being enclosed in convent walls.  At first she had had her parents to take care of, but when they died she had been left entirely alone in the great chateau, and devoted herself to prayer and works of charity among the villagers and country people.

“Ah! she is good—­she is a saint Mademoiselle,” the poor people always said when speaking of her; but they also always looked a little awe-stricken when she appeared, and never were sorry when she left them.

She was a tall woman, with a pale, rigid, handsome face, which never smiled.  She did nothing but good deeds, but however grateful her pensioners might be, nobody would ever have dared to dream of loving her.  She was just and cold and severe.  She wore always a straight black serge gown, broad bands of white linen, and a rosary and crucifix at her waist.  She read nothing but religious works and legends of the saints and martyrs, and adjoining her private apartments was a little stone chapel, where the servants said she used to kneel on the cold floor before the altar and pray for hours in the middle of the night.

The little cure of the village, who was plump and comfortable, and who had the kindest heart and the most cheerful soul in the world, used to remonstrate with her, always in a roundabout way, however, never quite as if he were referring directly to herself.

“One must not let one’s self become the stone image of goodness,” he said once.  “Since one is really of flesh and blood, and lives among flesh and blood, that is not best.  No, no; it is not best.”

But Mademoiselle de Rochemont never seemed exactly of flesh and blood—­she was more like a marble female saint who had descended from her pedestal to walk upon the earth.

And she did not change, even when the baby Elizabeth was brought to her.  She attended strictly to the child’s comfort and prayed many prayers for her innocent soul, but it can be scarcely said that her manner was any softer or that she smiled more.  At first Elizabeth used to scream at the sight of the black, nun-like dress and the rigid, handsome face, but in course of time she became accustomed to them, and, through living in an atmosphere so silent and without brightness, a few months changed her from a laughing, romping baby into a pale, quiet child, who rarely made any childish noise at all.