‘I had no notion that clothes were so dear,’ said Lesbia, when she saw how little she had got for her money.

‘My dear, you have two gowns which are absolutely chien,’ replied Lady Kirkbank, ’and you have a corset which gives you a figure, which you must forgive me for saying you never had before.’

Lady Kirkbank had to explain that chien as applied to a gown or bonnet was the same thing as chic, only a little more so.

‘I hope my gowns will always be chien,’ said Lesbia meekly.

Next evening they were dining at Cannes, with the blue sea in front of their windows, dining at a table all abloom with orange flowers, tea roses, mignonette, waxen camellias, and pale Parma violets, while Lady Maulevrier and Mary dined tete-a-tete at Fellside, with the feathery snow flakes falling outside, and the world whitening all around them.

Next day the world was all white, and Mary’s beloved hills were inaccessible.

Who could tell how long they might be covered; the winding tracks hidden; the narrow forces looking like black water or molten iron against that glittering whiteness?  Mary could only walk along the road by Loughrigg to the bench called ‘Rest and be thankful,’ from which she looked with longing eyes across towards the Langdale Pikes, and to the sharp cone-shaped peak, known as Coniston Old Man, just visible above the nearer hills.  Fraeulein Mueller suggested that it was in just such weather as this that a well brought up young lady, a young lady with Vernunft and Anstand, should devote herself to the improvement of her mind.

‘Let us read German this abscheulich afternoon,’ said the Fraeulein.  ‘Suppose we go on with the “Sorrows of Werther."’

‘Werther was a fool,’ cried Mary; ‘any book but that.’

‘Will you choose your own book?’

‘Let me read Heine.’

Fraeulein looked doubtful.  There were things in Heine—­an all-pervading tone—­which rendered him hardly an appropriate poet for ’the young person.’  But Fraeulein compromised the matter by letting Mary read Atta Troll, the exact bearing of which neither of them understood.

‘How beautifully Mr. Hammond read Heine that morning!’ said Mary, breaking off suddenly from a perfectly automatic reading.

‘You did not hear him, did you?  You were not there,’ said the Fraeulein.

’I was not there, but I heard him.  I—­I was sitting on the bank among the pine trees.’

’Why did you not come and sit with us?  It would have been more ladylike than to hide yourself behind the trees.’

Mary blushed crimson.

‘I had been in the kennels with Maulevrier; I was not fit to be seen,’ she said.

‘Hardly a ladylike admission,’ replied the Fraeulein, who felt that with Lady Mary her chief duty was to reprove.

CHAPTER XV.