They found apartments readily enough; but to find any suited to their means was, as Mrs. Costello anticipated, anything but an easy matter.  Lucia began, before the morning was over, to realize the fact that their L400 a year, which had been a perfectly comfortable income in Canada, would require very careful management to afford them at all a suitable living in Paris.

“It is only for a little while, though,” she consoled herself.  “In summer we shall be able to go into the country and find something much cheaper.”

So they continued their search, and at last found just what they wanted; though to do so, they had to mount so many stairs that Lucia was afraid her mother would be exhausted.

“I do not think this will do, mamma,” she said.  “I should never dare to ask you to go out, because when you came in tired, you would have all this fatigue.”

But the rooms were comfortable and airy, and the difficulties of living “au cinquieme” were considered on the whole to be surmountable; so the affair was settled.  Then came the minor considerations of a new housekeeping, and Margery was heartily regretted; though what the good woman would have been able to do where she could neither understand nor make herself understood, would not have been easy to say.  Even Mrs. Costello, who, in her youth, had had considerable practice in speaking French, found herself now and then at a loss; and as for Lucia, having only a sort of school-girl knowledge of the language, she instantly found her comprehension swept away in the flood of words poured upon her by every person she ventured to speak to.  “Never mind, I shall soon learn,” she said in the most valiant manner; but, alas! for the present, she was almost helpless, and Mrs. Costello had to arrange, bargain, and interpret for both.

They wound up their day’s business by a little shopping, which, like everything else, was new to Lucia.  The splendid shops, lighted up in the early dusk of the winter afternoon, were as different as anything could be from the stores at Cacouna.  A sudden desire to be possessed of a purse full of money, which she might empty in these enchanted palaces, was the immediate and natural effect of the occasion on the mind of such an unsophisticated visitor.  She became, indeed, so completely lost in admiration, that her mother made her small purchases without being able to obtain anything but the vaguest and most unsatisfactory opinions on such trifling affairs.

Mr. Wynter derived considerable amusement from watching his young cousin and future ward.  He told his wife afterwards that he had begun the day’s work entirely from a sense of duty towards poor Mary; but that for once he had found that kind of thing almost as amusing as women seemed to do.  The young girl with her half-Indian nature, and wholly Canadian—­ultra Canadian—­bringing up, was so bright, simple, and naive, that she was worth watching.  Her wonderful beauty, and the