“It is very kind of you to spare me some time, monsieur,” said Madame de Ferrier.  She admonished Paul—­“Don’t choke your little mother.”

I told her boldly that nothing but the dread of disturbing her kept me from knocking every day.  We had always walked into the lodges without knocking, and I dwelt on this as one of my new accomplishments.

“I am not studying night and day,” she answered.  “Sophie Saint-Michel and her mother were my teachers, and they are gone now, one to heaven and the other to Castorland.”

Remembering what Annabel de Chaumont said about holy Sophie I inquired if she had been religious.

“The Saint-Michels were better than religious; both mother and daughter were eternally patient with the poor count, whose troubles unsettled his reason.  They had no dear old Ernestine, and were reduced to the hardest labor.  I was a little child when we came to America, yet even then the spirit of the Saint-Michels seemed to me divine.”

“I wish I could remember when I was a little child.”

“Can you not recall anything?”

“I have a dim knowledge of objects.”

“What objects?”

“St. Regis church, and my taking first communion; and the hunting, the woods and water, boats, snowshoes, the kind of food I liked; Skenedonk and all my friends—­but I scarcely knew them as persons until I awoke.”

“What is your first distinct recollection?”

“Your face.”

“Mine?”

“Yes, yours, madame.  I saw it above me when you came into the room at night.”

She looked past me and said: 

“You have fortunately missed some of the most terrible events that ever happened in the world, monsieur.  My mother and father, my two brothers, Cousin Philippe and I, were in prison together.  My mother and brothers were taken, and we were left.”

I understood that she spoke of the Terror, about which I was eager to know every then unwritten detail.  Doctor Chantry had told me many things.  It fascinated me far more than ancient history, which my master was inclined to press upon me.

“How can you go back to France, madame?”

“That’s what I ask myself every day.  That life was like a strange nightmare.  Yet there was our chateau, Mont-Louis, two or three days’ journey east from Paris.  The park was so beautiful.  I think of it, and of Paul.”

“And what about this country, madame?  Is there nothing beautiful here?”

“The fact has been impressed on me, monsieur, that it does not belong to me.  I am an emigre.  In city or country my father and Cousin Philippe kept me with them.  I have seen nothing of young people, except at balls.  We had no intimate friends.  We were always going back.  I am still waiting to go back, monsieur—­and refusing to go if I must.”

It was plain that her life had been as restricted as mine, though the bonds were different.  She was herded with old people, made a wife and mother while yet a child, nursed in shadow instead of in the hot sunshine which produced Annabel de Chaumont.