To this letter Lord Lackington replied, promising to come over and see his daughter.  But an attack of gout delayed him, and, before he was out of his room, Lady Rose was dead.  Then he no longer talked of coming over, and his solicitors arranged matters.  An allowance of a hundred pounds a year was made to Madame Le Breton, through the “honest lawyer” whom Lady Rose had found, for the benefit of “Julie Dalrymple,” the capital value to be handed over to that young lady herself on the attainment of her eighteenth birthday—­always provided that neither she nor anybody on her behalf made any further claim on the Lackington family, that her relationship to them was dropped, and her mother’s history buried in oblivion.

Accordingly the girl grew to maturity in Bruges.  By the lawyer’s advice, after her mother’s death, she took the name of her old gouvernante, and was known thenceforward as Julie Le Breton.  The Ursuline nuns, to whose school she was sent, took the precaution, after her mother’s death, of having her baptized straightway into the Catholic faith, and she made her premiere communion in their church.  In the course of a few years she became a remarkable girl, the source of many anxieties to the nuns.  For she was not only too clever for their teaching, and an inborn sceptic, but wherever she appeared she produced parties and the passions of parties.  And though, as she grew older, she showed much adroitness in managing those who were hostile to her, she was never without enemies, and intrigues followed her.

“I might have been warned in time,” said Lady Henry, in whose wrinkled cheeks a sharp and feverish color had sprung up as her story approached the moment of her own personal acquaintance with Mademoiselle Le Breton.  “For one or two of the nuns when I saw them in Bruges, before the bargain was finally struck, were candid enough.  However, now I come to the moment when I first set eyes on her.  You know my little place in Surrey?  About a mile from me is a manor-house belonging to an old Catholic family, terribly devout and as poor as church-mice.  They sent their daughters to school in Bruges.  One summer holiday these girls brought home with them Julie Dalrymple as their quasi-holiday governess.  It was three years ago.  I had just seen Liebreich.  He told me that I should soon be blind, and, naturally, it was a blow to me.”

Sir Wilfrid made a murmur of sympathy.

“Oh, don’t pity me!  I don’t pity other people.  This odious body of ours has got to wear out sometime—­it’s in the bargain.  Still, just then I was low.  There are two things I care about—­one is talk, with the people that amuse me, and the other is the reading of French books.  I didn’t see how I was going to keep my circle here together, and my own mind in decent repair, unless I could find somebody to be eyes for me, and to read to me.  And as I’m a bundle of nerves, and I never was agreeable to illiterate people, nor they to me, I was rather put to it.  Well, one day these girls and their mother came over to tea, and, as you guess, of course, they brought Mademoiselle Le Breton with them.  I had asked them to come, but when they arrived I was bored and cross, and like a sick dog in a hole.  And then, as you have seen her, I suppose you can guess what happened.”