me to take it off.  She accused me of putting it on to make the marquis look at me.  I don’t know that I was impertinent, but I spoke up like an honest girl and didn’t count my words.  A red ribbon indeed!  As if it was my ribbons the marquis looked at!  My lady knew afterwards that I was perfectly respectable, but she never said a word to show that she believed it.  But the marquis did!” Mrs. Bread presently added, “I took off my red ribbon and put it away in a drawer, where I have kept it to this day.  It’s faded now, it’s a very pale pink; but there it lies.  My grudge has faded, too; the red has all gone out of it; but it lies here yet.”  And Mrs. Bread stroked her black satin bodice.

Newman listened with interest to this decent narrative, which seemed to have opened up the deeps of memory to his companion.  Then, as she remained silent, and seemed to be losing herself in retrospective meditation upon her perfect respectability, he ventured upon a short cut to his goal.  “So Madame de Bellegarde was jealous; I see.  And M. de Bellegarde admired pretty women, without distinction of class.  I suppose one mustn’t be hard upon him, for they probably didn’t all behave so properly as you.  But years afterwards it could hardly have been jealousy that turned Madame de Bellegarde into a criminal.”

Mrs. Bread gave a weary sigh.  “We are using dreadful words, sir, but I don’t care now.  I see you have your idea, and I have no will of my own.  My will was the will of my children, as I called them; but I have lost my children now.  They are dead—­I may say it of both of them; and what should I care for the living?  What is any one in the house to me now—­what am I to them?  My lady objects to me—­she has objected to me these thirty years.  I should have been glad to be something to young Madame de Bellegarde, though I never was nurse to the present marquis.  When he was a baby I was too young; they wouldn’t trust me with him.  But his wife told her own maid, Mamselle Clarisse, the opinion she had of me.  Perhaps you would like to hear it, sir.”

“Oh, immensely,” said Newman.

“She said that if I would sit in her children’s schoolroom I should do very well for a penwiper!  When things have come to that I don’t think I need stand upon ceremony.”

“Decidedly not,” said Newman.  “Go on, Mrs. Bread.”

Mrs. Bread, however, relapsed again into troubled dumbness, and all Newman could do was to fold his arms and wait.  But at last she appeared to have set her memories in order.  “It was when the late marquis was an old man and his eldest son had been two years married.  It was when the time came on for marrying Mademoiselle Claire; that’s the way they talk of it here, you know, sir.  The marquis’s health was bad; he was very much broken down.  My lady had picked out M. de Cintre, for no good reason that I could see.  But there are reasons, I very well know, that are beyond me, and you must be high in the world to understand them.