“You love M. Isidore far more than you think or will avow.”

“No.  I danced with a young officer the other night whom I love a thousand times more than he.  Colonel Alfred de Hamal suits me far better. Vive les joies et les plaisirs!”

It was as English teacher that I was engaged at Madame Beck’s school, but the annual fete brought me into prominence in another capacity.  The programme included a dramatic performance, with pupils and teachers for actors, and this was given under the superintendence of M. Paul Emanuel.  I was dressed a couple of hours before anyone else, and reading in my classroom, the door was flung open, and in came M. Paul with a burst of execrable jargon:  “Mees, play you must; I am planted here.”

“What can I do for you?” I inquired.

“Play you must.  I will not have you shrink, or frown, or make the prude.  Let us thrust to the wall all reluctance.”

What did the little man mean?

“Listen!” he said.  “The case shall be stated, and you shall answer me ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’  Louise Vanderkelkov has fallen ill—­at least, so her ridiculous mother asserts.  She is charged with a role; without that role the play stopped.  Englishwomen are either the best or the worst of their sex.  I apply to an Englishwoman to save me.  What is her answer—­’Yes,’ or ’No’?”

Seeing in his vexed, fiery and searching eye an appeal behind its menace, my lips dropped the word “Oui.”

His rigid countenance relaxed with a quiver of content; then he went on: 

“Here is the book.  Here is your role.  You must withdraw.”  He conveyed me to the attic, locked me in, and took away the key.

What I felt that successful night, and what I did, I no more expected to feel and do than to be lifted in a trance to the seventh heaven.  A keen relish for dramatic expression revealed itself as part of my nature.  But the strength of longing must be put by; and I put it by, and fastened it in with the lock of a resolution which neither time nor temptation has since picked.

It was at this school fete that I discovered the identity of Miss Fanshawe’s M. Isidore.  She whispered to me, after the play:  “Isidore and Alfred de Hamal are both here!” The latter I found was a straight-nosed, correct-featured little dandy, nicely dressed, curled, booted, and gloved; and Isidore was the manly English Dr. John, who attended the pupils of the school, and was none other than the gentleman whose directions to an hotel I had failed to follow on the night of my arrival in Villette.  And the puppet, the manikin—­a mere lackey for Dr. John, his valet, his foot-boy, was the favoured admirer of Ginevra Fanshawe!

III.—­Old Friends are Best

During the long vacation I stayed at the school, and, in the absence of companionship and the sedative of work, suffered such agonising depression as led to physical illness, until one evening, after wandering aimlessly in the city, I fell fainting as I tried to reach the porch of a great church.  When I recovered consciousness, I found myself in a room that smiled “Auld lang syne” out of every nook.