was at one end of this terrace, and there old Babette sat in the cool shelling peas, shredding beans, and issuing orders to Margot in the sultry atmosphere of the kitchen stove.  Bessie, alone in the salon one August morning, heard the shrill monotone of her voice in the pauses of a day-dream.  She had dropped her book because, try as she would to hold her attention to the story, her thoughts lost themselves continually, and were found again at every turning of the page astray somewhere about the Forest—­about home.

“It is very strange!  I cannot help thinking of them.  I wonder whether anything is happening?” she said, and yielded to the subtle influence.  She began to walk to and fro the salon.  She went over in her mind many scenes; she recollected incidents so trivial that they had been long ago forgotten—­how Willie had broken the wooden leg of little Polly’s new Dutch doll (for surgical practice), and how Polly had raised the whole house with her lamentations.  And then she fell to reckoning how old the boys would be now and how big, until suddenly she caught herself laughing through tears at that cruel pang of her own when, after submitting to be the victim of Harry Musgrave’s electrical experiments, he had neglected to reward her with the anticipated kiss.  “I wonder whether he remembers?—­girls remember such silly things.”  In this fancy she stood still, her bright face addressed towards the court.  Through the trees over the wall appeared the gray dome of the cathedral.  Launcelot came sauntering and waving his watering-can.  The stout figure of the canon issued from the doorway of a small pavilion which he called his omnibus, passed along under the shadow of the wall, and out into the glowing sun.  Madame entered the salon, her light quick steps ringing on the parquet, her holiday voice clear as a carol, her holiday figure gay as a showy-plumaged bird.

“Ma cherie, tu n’es pas sortie? tu ne fais rien?”

Bessie awoke from her reverie, and confessed that she was idle this morning, very idle and uncomfortably restless:  it was the heat, she thought, and she breathed a vast sigh.  Madame invited her to do something by way of relief to her ennui, and after a brief considering fit she said she would go into the cathedral, where it was the coolest, and take her sketching-block.

Oh, for the moist glades of the Forest, for the soft turf under foot and the thick verdure overhead!  Bessie longed for them with all her heart as she passed upon the sun-baked stones to the great door of the cathedral.  The dusk of its vaulted roof was not cool and sweet like the arching of green branches, but chill with damp odors of antiquity.  She sat down in one of the arcades near the portal above the steps that descend into the nave.  The immense edifice seemed quite empty.  The perpetual lamp burned before the altar, and wandering echoes thrilled in the upper galleries.  Through a low-browed open door streamed across the aisle a flood of sunshine, and there was the sound of chisel and mallet from the same quarter, the stone-yard of the cathedral; but there was no visible worshipper—­nothing to interrupt her mood of reverie.