Annabel de Chaumont openly hated the isolation of the place, and was happy only when she could fill it with guests.  But Madame de Ferrier evidently loved it, remaining there with Paul and Ernestine.  Sometimes I did not see her for days together.  But Mademoiselle de Chaumont, before her departure to her Baltimore convent for the winter, amused herself with my education.  She brought me an old book of etiquette in which young gentlemen were admonished not to lick their fingers or crack bones with their teeth at table.  Nobody else being at hand she befooled with Doctor Chantry and me, and I saw for the first time, with surprise, an old man’s infatuation with a poppet.

It was this foolishness of her brother’s which Miss Chantry could not forgive De Chaumont’s daughter.  She was incessant in her condemnation, yet unmistakably fond in her English way of the creature she condemned.  Annabel loved to drag my poor master in flowery chains before his relative.  She would make wreaths of crimson leaves for his bald head, and exhibit him grinning like a weak-eyed Bacchus.  Once he sat doting beside her at twilight on a bench of the wide gallery while his sister, near by, kept guard over their talk.  I passed them, coming back from my tramp, with a glowing branch in my hand.  For having set my teeth in the scarlet tart udder of a sumach, all frosted with delicate fretwork, I could not resist bringing away some of its color.

“Did you get that for me?” called Annabel.  I mounted the steps to give it to her, and she said, “Thank you, Lazarre Williams.  Every day you learn some pretty new trick.  Doctor Chantry has not brought me anything from the woods in a long while.”

Doctor Chantry stirred his gouty feet and looked hopelessly out at the landscape.

“Sit here by your dearest Annabel,” said Mademoiselle de Chaumont.

Her governess breathed the usual sigh of disgust.

I sat by my dearest Annabel, anxious to light my candle and open my books.  She shook the frizzes around her cheeks and buried her hands under the scarlet branch in her lap.

“Do you know, Lazarre Williams, I have to leave you?”

I said I was sorry to hear it.

“Yes, I have to go back to my convent, and drag poor Miss Chantry with me, though she is a heretic and bates the forms of our religion.  But she has to submit, and so do I, because my father will have nobody but an English governess.”

“Mademoiselle,” spoke Miss Chantry, “I would suggest that you sit on a chair by yourself.”

“What, on one of those little crowded chairs?” said Annabel.

She reached out her sly hand for mine and drew it under cover of the sumach branch.

“I have been thinking about your rank a great deal, Lazarre Williams, and wondering what it is.”

“If you thought more about your own it would be better,” said Miss Chantry.

“We are Americans here,” said Annabel.  “All are equal, and some are free.  I am only equal.  Must your dearest Annabel obey you about the chair, Miss Chantry?”