‘Who bade you?’ she retorted.  ’I never asked you to waste your time here!’

’And will ye not give me a glance of the eyes that have made a cinder of my poor heart, when I am going away into the desolate north, among the bears and the savages and the heretics?’

’There will be plenty of eyes there to look at your fine green and gold, for the sake of the Paris cut; though a great lumbering fellow like you does not know how to show it off!’

’And if I bring back a heretic bru to break the heart of the mother, will it not be all the fault of the cruelty of Mademoiselle Victorine?’

Here Estelle, unable to withstand Lanty’s piteous intonations, broke in, ’Never mind, Laurent, Victorine goes with us.  She went to be measured for a new pair of slices on purpose!’

’Ah!  I thought I should disembarrass myself of a great troublesome Irishman!’

‘No!’ retorted the boy, ’you knew Laurent was going, for Maitre Hebert had just come in to say he must have a lackey’s suit!’

‘Yes,’ said Estelle, ’that was when you took me in your arms and kissed me, and said you would follow Madame la Comtesse to the end of the world.’

The old nurse laughed heartily, but Victorine cried out, ’Does Mademoiselle think I am going to follow naughty little girls who invent follies?  It is still free to me to change my mind.  Poor Simon Claquette is gnawing his heart out, and he is to be left concierge!’

The clock at the palace chimed eleven, Estelle took her brother’s hand, Honor rose with little Jacques in her arms, Victorine paced beside her, and Lanty as La Jeunesse followed, puffing out his breast, and wielding his cane, as they all went home to dejeuner.

Twenty-nine years before the opening of this narrative, just after the battle of Boyne Water had ruined the hopes of the Stewarts in Ireland, Sir Ulick Burke had attended James Ii. in his flight from Waterford; and his wife had followed him, attended by her two faithful servants, Patrick Callaghan, and his wife Honor, carrying her mistress’s child on her bosom, and her own on her back.

Sir Ulick, or Le Chevalier Bourke, as the French called him, had no scruple in taking service in the armies of Louis XIV.  Callaghan followed him everywhere, while Honor remained a devoted attendant on her lady, doubly bound to her by exile and sorrow.

Little Ulick Burke’s foster-sister died, perhaps because she had always been made second to him through all the hardships and exposure of the journey.  Other babes of both lady and nurse had succumbed to the mortality which beset the children of that generation, and the only survivors besides the eldest Burke and one daughter were the two youngest of each mother, and they had arrived so nearly at the same time that Honor Callaghan could again be foster-mother to Phelim Burke, a sickly child, reared with great difficulty.