Kergolay—a baroness, mind you, of the old
stock, and not one the day before yesterday—
is a lady of ancient extraction, high rank, and
ascertained position in society. She has had
misfortunes, cruel and bitter misfortunes, but
sooner than keep a Pension and suck the blood
of young children, she would stand and sell
matches at the corner of the Rue de la Chaussée
d'Antin. Yes, my child; suck their blood!
That is what the Marcassin does. She is a real
Count Ugolino."

A considerable period had apparently elapsed
since Madame Prudence had perused the works
of Dante. Lily, however, knew quite as little
about Count Ugolino as the housekeeper did;
and the assurance that Madame de Kergolay did
not keep a school was quite sufficient for her.

The baroness lived in the Marais, in one of
the tallest and oldest houses of that tall old
quarter. It was a red brick house, too: almost
as great a rarity in Paris as a stone house is in
London. The entire mansion, Madame
Prudence took care to inform Lily, belonged to the
baroness: but she let it out in flats to respectable
tenants, and reserved only one floor, the
third, for her own use.

CHAPTER XXX. IN THE MARAIS.

IF Madame de Kergolay had lived on a third
floor in London, the altitude of her dwelling-
place would have been accepted as primâ facially
conclusive evidence of her impoverished
circumstances. But indigence, in Paris, does not
necessarily correspond with the number of stairs
you have to mount to your abode; and, although
the baroness's apartment was au troisième, it
was spacious, comfortable, and even elegant.

Madame Prudence was short-winded, and, as
she toiled up the staircase, uttered sundry
invectives against a certain "Satané" asthma
which troubled her. The Abbé Chatain would
not have failed to reprove her for using so
naughty an adjective; and of this eventuality
Madame Prudence seemed herself aware, for, on
the second landing, she objurgated the asthma
with bated breath, and apostrophised it only as
a "Cosaque." But she was very glad to rest
awhile on this penultimate flight, while Lily
gazed with admiration through an œil-de-bœuf
casement on the vast panorama of slated roofs
and chimney-stacks which stretched around and
beneath her. The sweetly-savoured smoke from
the wood fires curled in delicate violet hue
against the clear blue sky; and the distant
melody of a piano—played not as a school task,
but for pleasure, for the instrumentalist carolled
a lively ditty as he sang—came and smote her
very sweetly on the ear. It was a simple matter
to be pleased with, yet Lily felt as though she
could have clapped her hands, and sung back
again. Poor little creature! she had seen so
little, as yet, of the only city in the world worth
living in.

"I should like," she said, in airy prattle to her
new found friend," always to live here, and look
through that window. See, there is a woman
hauling out linen on a roof. Oh, if there were
only some birds. There used to be birds at Miss
Bunnycastle's."

"Bird yourself," rejoined the good-humoured
housekeeper. "Silly little chatterer, you'd
soon get tired of your bird's-eye view, I'll
warrant. Yes, yes, there are better things to
be seen within. Come! My respiration is a
little restored. We will ring at the good lady's
bell."

A lively piece of sculpture, in the likeness of
a horse's forefoot, hung at the end of a silken
cord by the side of a door whose central panel
exhibited a brass plate, and, thereon, in very
spiky and attenuated black letters, the words,
"Madame la Baronne de Kergolay." Lily felt
a slight tremor when she read "baroness." The
remembrance of a former "countess" was rather
conducive to a conviction on her part that she
had had enough to do with titles of nobility
for the term of her natural life.

A withered old man, very diminutive but
with a very large head, and perhaps the thinnest
pair of spindle-shanks ever seen out of a
museum of anatomical preparations, opened the
door, and grinned in a hospitable manner at the
new comers.

"This is my brother Thomas," said Madame
Prudence, introducing the little old man,
"although you will oftener hear him addressed
by his little name of Vieux Sablons. He is twenty
years older than I; but in his youth was a furious
gaillard. Even now il fait des farces. He is as
upright as a dart, as strong as Hercules, and
sain comme mon Å“il."

Thomas, otherwise Vieux Sablons, grinned so
extensively while these praises were being
bestowed on him that, in the mind of the timid,
some fear might have arisen respecting the
permanent cohesion of his superior and inferior
jaws. This time, however, no divorce between
the upper and lower portions of his head took
place. The grin subsiding into a smirk, he
shut the outer door behind the visitors, and
ushered them into the interior of the premises.

Lily remarked that Thomas's large head,
though quite bald on the summit, and very
scantily furnished with thin locks about the ears,
was plentifully powdered. He wore, moreover,
earrings: at which, I take it, an English Jeames
would have been astounded, if not scandalised.
He was habited in a green livery coat, short in
the waist, and shorter in the tails, shortest of all
from a proportional point of view in the cuffs,
and ornamented with a shoulder-knot of
tarnished silver bullion. It was a coat worn to the
very shabbiest, and scrupulously neat, and the
large plated buttons had been so often polished
that the armorial cognizance on them, as on a
Louis the Fifteenth franc, was well-nigh defaced.
Thomas's waistcoat had fallen likewise into the
sere and yellow leaf—or, rather, the leaf that is
sere without being yellow, for the original hue
of the nankeen which formed its texture had,