Dinner was quickly over, and at a signal from her ladyship, the folding doors were thrown open, and we defiled into the Green Saloon, I bringing up the rear meekly.  On the table were fruit and flowers, and one small bottle of some light wine.  The butler filled her ladyship’s glass, and then withdrew.

“You can take a pear, little girl,” said Lady Chillington.  Accordingly I took a pear, but when I had got it I was too timid to eat it, and could do nothing but hold it between my hot palms.  Had I been at Park Hill Seminary, I should soon have made my teeth meet in the fruit; but I was not certain as to the proper mode of eating pears in society.

Lady Chillington placed her glass in her eye and examined me critically.

“Haie! haie!” she said.  “That good Chinfeather has not quite eradicated our gaucherie, it seems.  We are deficient in ease and aplomb.  What is the name of that Frenchwoman, Agnes, who ‘finished’ Lady Kinbuck’s girls?”

“You mean Madame Delclos.”

“The same.  Look out her address to-morrow, and remind me that you write to her.  If mademoiselle here remain in England, she will grow up weedy, and will never learn to carry her shoulders properly.  Besides, the child has scarcely two words to say for herself.  A little Parisian training may prove beneficial.  At her age a French girl of family would be a little duchess in bearing and manners, even though she had never been outside the walls of her pension.  How is such an anomaly to be accounted for?  It is possible that the atmosphere may have something to do with it.”

Here was fresh food for wonder, and for such serious thought as my age admitted of.  I was to be sent to a school in France!  I could not make up my mind whether to be sorry or glad.  In truth, I was neither wholly the one nor the other; the tangled web of my feelings was something altogether beyond my skill to unravel.

Lady Chillington sipped her wine absently awhile; Sister Agnes was busy with some fine needlework; and I was striving to elaborate a giant and his attendant dwarf out of the glowing embers and cavernous recesses of the wood fire, while there was yet an underlying vein of thought at work in my mind which busied itself desultorily with trying to piece together all that I had ever heard or read of life in a French school.

“You can run away now, little girl.  You are de trop,” said her ladyship, turning on me in her abrupt fashion.  “And you, Agnes, may as well read to me a couple of chapters out of the ‘Girondins.’  What a wonderful man was that Robespierre!  What a giant!  Had he but lived, how different the history of Europe would have been from what we know it to-day.”

I could almost have kissed her ladyship of my own accord, so pleased was I to get away.  I made my curtsey to her, and also to Sister Agnes, whose only reply was a sweet, sad smile, and managed to preserve my dignity till I was out of the room.  But when the door was safely closed behind me, I ran, I flew along the passages till I reached the housekeeper’s room.  Dance was not there, neither had candles yet been lighted.  The bright moonlight pouring in through the window gave me a new idea.