’Pride, my dear—­Scotch pride; that is what kept me vegetating in this awful place when my heart was in the Highlands.  Tell me about Gairloch and Helensburgh, and dear old Glasgow.  I have never forgotten it, though I was too proud to parade my poverty in its streets.’

’I will tell you nothing, Henrietta, till I hear what all this means.  Have you really been worse off lately?’

‘My dear, for twelve months I have not had a creature in my house,’ said Madame Bonnemain, and her face grew graver and older in its outline,—­’positively not a creature.  Bruges has gone down as a place for English residents, and I don’t wonder at it.’

‘It is very beautiful, Henrietta,’ said Mrs. Fordyce quickly,—­’so quaint; everything about it a picture.’

’People can’t live on quaintness, my love, and the narrowness and tyranny of it is intolerable.  I hate it.  When I go away from Bruges I never want to set eyes on it again as long as I live.’

Her eyes shone, her cheeks grew red, her little mouth set itself in quite a determined curve.  Mrs. Fordyce perceived that she had some serious umbrage against the old Flemish town—­a grudge which would never be wiped away.  And yet it was very picturesque, with its grey old houses, its quaint spires, its flat fields spreading away from the canal, its rows of stately poplar trees.

’There is nothing really more terrible, Isabel, than the English life in a foreign town.  It is so narrow, so petty—­I had almost said so degraded.  I should not have taken your pretty ward into my house here suppose you had prayed me to do it.  Nothing could possibly be worse for a young girl; she could not escape its influence.  No, I should never have taken her here.’

’Why have you stayed so long, then, Henrietta, among such undesirable surroundings?’

’Because it is cheap.  There is no other reason in this world would keep anybody in Bruges,’ replied Madame promptly.

’But you have not yet told me why you cannot take the position offered you.’

Then Madame turned her bright eyes, over-running with laughter, to her friend, and there was a blush, faint and rosy as a girl’s, on her cheek.

’Because, my dear, I have accepted another situation—­a permanent one.  I am going to marry again.’

‘Oh, Henrietta, impossible!’

‘Quite true, my dear.’

‘Another foreign gentleman, of course?’

’Why of course?  No, I am going to rise in the world.  I am going to marry an English colonel, Isabel, and return to my own land.  I believe I told him that was my chief reason for accepting him at first.’

‘But not at last?’ hazarded Mrs. Fordyce, with a teasing smile.

’Well, no; romance is not dead yet, Isabel.  But I shall tell you my story by and by.  Here we are.’