The attitude had been so full of abandonment that she bounded up like a spring on hearing the door open.

Perceiving that it was Elizabeth she lapsed into ease, and came across to her with a reckless skip that innate grace only prevented from being boisterous.

“Why, you are late,” she said, taking hold of Elizabeth-Jane’s hands.

“There were so many little things to put up.”

“And you seem dead-alive and tired.  Let me try to enliven you by some wonderful tricks I have learnt, to kill time.  Sit there and don’t move.”  She gathered up the pack of cards, pulled the table in front of her, and began to deal them rapidly, telling Elizabeth to choose some.

“Well, have you chosen?” she asked flinging down the last card.

“No,” stammered Elizabeth, arousing herself from a reverie.  “I forgot, I was thinking of—­you, and me—­and how strange it is that I am here.”

Miss Templeman looked at Elizabeth-Jane with interest, and laid down the cards.  “Ah! never mind,” she said.  “I’ll lie here while you sit by me; and we’ll talk.”

Elizabeth drew up silently to the head of the sofa, but with obvious pleasure.  It could be seen that though in years she was younger than her entertainer in manner and general vision she seemed more of the sage.  Miss Templeman deposited herself on the sofa in her former flexuous position, and throwing her arm above her brow—­somewhat in the pose of a well-known conception of Titian’s—­talked up at Elizabeth-Jane invertedly across her forehead and arm.

“I must tell you something,” she said.  “I wonder if you have suspected it.  I have only been mistress of a large house and fortune a little while.”

“Oh—­only a little while?” murmured Elizabeth-Jane, her countenance slightly falling.

“As a girl I lived about in garrison towns and elsewhere with my father, till I was quite flighty and unsettled.  He was an officer in the army.  I should not have mentioned this had I not thought it best you should know the truth.”

“Yes, yes.”  She looked thoughtfully round the room—­at the little square piano with brass inlayings, at the window-curtains, at the lamp, at the fair and dark kings and queens on the card-table, and finally at the inverted face of Lucetta Templeman, whose large lustrous eyes had such an odd effect upside down.

Elizabeth’s mind ran on acquirements to an almost morbid degree.  “You speak French and Italian fluently, no doubt,” she said.  “I have not been able to get beyond a wretched bit of Latin yet.”

“Well, for that matter, in my native isle speaking French does not go for much.  It is rather the other way.”

“Where is your native isle?”

It was with rather more reluctance that Miss Templeman said, “Jersey.  There they speak French on one side of the street and English on the other, and a mixed tongue in the middle of the road.  But it is a long time since I was there.  Bath is where my people really belong to, though my ancestors in Jersey were as good as anybody in England.  They were the Le Sueurs, an old family who have done great things in their time.  I went back and lived there after my father’s death.  But I don’t value such past matters, and am quite an English person in my feelings and tastes.”