In the absence of her young lady, Mrs. Betts had unpacked and carefully disposed of Bessie’s limited possessions.

“Your wardrobe will not give me much trouble, miss,” said the waiting-woman, with sly, good-humored allusion to the extent of it.

“No,” answered Bessie, misunderstanding her in perfect simplicity.  “You will find all in order.  At school we mended our clothes and darned our stockings punctually every week.”

“Did you really do this beautiful darning, miss?  It is the finest darning I ever met with—­not to say it was lace.”  Mrs. Betts spoke more seriously, as she held up to view a pair of filmy Lille thread stockings which had sustained considerable dilapidation and repair.

“Yes.  They were not worth the trouble.  Mademoiselle Adelaide made us wear Lille thread on dancing-days that we might never want stockings to mend.  She had a passion for darning.  She taught us to graft also:  you will find one pair of black silk grafted toe and heel.  I have thought them much too precious ever to wear since.  I keep them for a curiosity.”

On the tables in Bessie’s sitting-room were set out her humble appliances for work, for writing—­an enamelled white box with cut-steel ornaments, much scratched; a capacious oval basket with a quilted red silk cover, much faded; a limp Russia-leather blotting-book wrapped in silver paper (Harry Musgrave had presented it to Bessie on her going into exile, and she had cherished it too dearly to expose it to the risk of blots at school).  “I think,” said she, “I shall begin to use it now.”

She released it from its envelope, smelt it, and laid it down comfortably in front of the Sevres china inkstand.  All the permanent furniture of the writing-table was of Sevres china.  Bessie thought it grotesque, and had no notion of the value of it.

“The big basket may be put aside?” suggested Mrs. Betts, and her young lady did not gainsay her.  But when the shabby little white enamelled box was threatened, she commanded that that should be left—­she had had it so long she could not bear to part with it.  It had been the joint-gift of Mr. and Mrs. Carnegie on her twelfth birthday.

Released, at length, from Mrs. Betts’s respectful, observant presence, Bessie began to look about her and consider her new habitation.  A sense of exaltation and a sense of bondage possessed her.  These pretty, quaint rooms were hers, then?  It was not a day-dream—­it was real.  She was at Abbotsmead—­at Kirkham.  Her true home-nest under the eaves at Beechhurst was hundreds of miles away:  farther still was the melancholy garden in the Rue St. Jean.