up my skirt as well as I could, and we walked along together.  The chateau is not very large, standing close to the road in a small park, really more of a manor house than a chateau.  She took us into the drawing-room just as stiff and bare as all the others I had seen, a polished parquet floor, straight-backed, hard chairs against the wall (the old lady herself looked as if she had sat up straight on a hard chair all her life).  In the middle of the room was an enormous palm-tree going straight up to the ceiling.  She said it had been there for years and always remained when she went to Paris in the spring.  She was a widow, lived alone in the chateau with the old servants.  Her daughter and grandchildren came occasionally to stay with her.  She gave us wine and cake, and was most agreeable.  I saw her often afterward, both in the country and Paris, and loved to hear her talk.  She had remained absolutely ancien regime, couldn’t understand modern life and ways at all.  One of the things that shocked her beyond words was to see her granddaughters and their young friends playing tennis with young men in flannels.  In her day a young man in bras de chemise would have been ashamed to appear before ladies in such attire.  We didn’t stay very long that day, as we were far from home, and the afternoon was shortening fast.  The retraite was sometimes long when we had miles of hard road before us, until we arrived at the farm or village where the carriage was waiting.  When we could walk our horses it was bearable, but sometimes when they broke into a jog-trot, which nothing apparently could make them change, it was very fatiguing after a long day.

Sometimes, when we had people staying with us, we followed the hunt in the carriage.  We put one of the keepers of the Villers-Cotterets forest on the box, and it was wonderful how much we could see.  The meet was always amusing, but when once the hunt had moved off, and the last stragglers disappeared in the forest, it didn’t seem as if there was any possibility of catching them; and sometimes we would drive in a perfectly opposite direction, but the old keeper knew all about the stags and their haunts when they would break out and cross the road, and when they would double and go back into the woods.  We were waiting one day in the heart of the forest, at one of the carrefours, miles away apparently from everything, and an absolute stillness around us.  Suddenly there came a rush and noise of galloping horses, baying hounds and horns, and a flash of red and green coats dashed by, disappearing in an instant in the thick woods before we had time to realize what it was.  It was over in a moment—­seemed an hallucination.  We saw and heard nothing more, and the same intense stillness surrounded us.  We had the same sight, the stag taken in the water, some years later, when we were alone at the chateau.  Mme. A. was dead, and her husband had gone to Paris to live.  We were sitting in the gallery