Their “heretical” religion had something to do with this; but their manifest avoidance of the other pupils during hours of recreation, Mademoiselle thought, had been a more potent cause,—­Emily, in particular, not speaking with her school-mates or teachers except when obliged to do so.  The other pupils thought them of outlandish accent and manners and ridiculously old to be at school at all,—­being twenty-four and twenty-six, and seeming even older.  Their sombre and grotesquely-ugly costumes were fruitful causes of mirth to the gay young Belgian misses.  The Brontes were not especially brilliant students, and none of their companions had ever suspected that they were geniuses.  Of the two, Emily was considered to be, in most respects, the more talented, but she was obstinate and opinionated.  Some of the pupils had been inclined to resist having Charlotte placed over them as teacher, and may have been mutinous.  After her return from Haworth she taught English to M. Heger and his brother-in-law.  M. Heger gave the sisters private lessons in French without charge, and for some time preserved their compositions, which Mrs. Gaskell copied.  Mrs. Gaskell visited the pensionnat in quest of material for her biography of Charlotte, and received all the aid M. Heger could afford:  the information thus obtained has, for the most part, we were told, been fairly used.  Miss Bronte’s letters from Brussels, so freely quoted in Mrs. Gaskell’s “Life,” were addressed to Miss Ellen Nussy, a familiar friend of Charlotte’s, whose signature we saw in the register at Haworth Church as witness to Miss Bronte’s marriage.  The Hegers had no suspicion that she had been so unhappy with them as these letters indicate, and she had assigned a totally different reason for her sudden return to England.  She had been introduced to Madame Heger by Mrs. Jenkins, wife of the then chaplain of the British Embassy at the Court of Belgium; she had frequently visited that lady and other friends in Brussels,—­among them Mary and Martha Taylor and their relatives, and the family of a Dr. ——­ (not Dr. John),—­and therefore her life here need not have been so lonely and desolate as it has been made to appear.

The Hegers usually have a few English pupils in the school, but have never had an American.

Some American tourists had before called to look at the garden, but the family are not pleased by the notoriety with which Miss Bronte has invested it.  However, Mademoiselle Heger kindly offered to conduct us over any portion of the establishment we might care to see, and led the way along the corridor, past the class-rooms and the refectoire on the right, to the narrow, high-walled garden.  We found it smaller than in the time when Miss Bronte loitered here in weariness and solitude.  Mademoiselle Heger explained that, while the width remains the same, the erection of class-rooms for the day-pupils has diminished the length by some yards.  Tall houses