passed by, she was forgotten by all save the
Marcassin. But the Marcassin remembered her very
well.

Madame Prudence had not beheld this little
scene unmoved. She had, it will be remembered,
an old feud with the schoolmistress; and,
deliberately spitting on the ground, with certain
solemn expressions of disparagement and
defiance, she drew Lily's arm under hers, and
walked on at a quick pace.

Lily did not fail to tell Madame de Kergolay,
when they reached home, of her little adventure.
The baroness deemed it her duty gently to chide
the priest's housekeeper for her intemperance of
language towards Mademoiselle Marcassin, but
added the expression of a hope that she had not
heard it.

"With a thousand reverences towards yourself,
Madame la Baronne, and begging pardon
for having spoken in the language of the people
to which I belong, and against the canons of
Christian charity which have been taught me by
M. l'Abbé Chatain, I most sincerely wish that
Mademoiselle Marcassin did hear what I said.
Too long she tormented at her ease this dear
innocent child; and the stories which the abbé
has told me of her cruelty and tyranny have
made me, time after time, burn over with the
desire of tearing her wicked old eyes out."

"That would be very wrong indeed, Madame
Prudence"—it was the baroness who spoke.
"We should forgive all our enemies, even as we
hope to be forgiven."

"I humbly ask pardon," replied Madame
Prudence, with a low curtsey; "and I will pray
for Mademoiselle Bluebeards this very night;
but I should like to pass a little quarter of an
hour with her, nevertheless."

"And, I am sure," interposed Lily, "that I
forgive her. It was nothing, perhaps, but
temper."

"It was nothing, perhaps, but choux-fleurs à
la sauce," Madame Prudence said afterwards,
in good-humoured banter (but not in the
baroness's presence), to Lily. "My poor little
angel heart, I tell you that woman was made of
marble. Marble! Lava of a volcano, rather.
Some years ago it may have been boiling and
red-hot, and now it is turned into stone."

The dinner-hour on the third floor in the
Marais was invariably six o'clock. The bill of
fare was always simple; but the style, on which
Vieux Sablons so prided himself, was never lacking.
Twice a week the baroness fasted. She
did not expect Lily to do the same, and even
endeavoured to dissuade her from following her
example; but the girl thought, in her simple
heart, that it would be selfish not to abstain from
meat, as her friends did upon meagre days; and
besides she thought the sorrel soup, the fish, the
vegetables, and omelettes which Babette served
up on non-flesh days, very nice and succulent.
On Sundays and feasts, they had generally some
little extra delicacy—a charlotte aux pornmés, or
a turkey stuffed with chesnuts.

After dinner came, on visiting evenings—that
is to say, when Madame "received" on Tuesdays
and Thursdays—a few very old gentlemen and a
few very old ladies. They all seemed to have
been shipwrecked, to have been knocked to
pieces like the porcelain dessert services, and
put together again. The Vidame de Barsae
was seventy. He earned his living now as
a teacher of English, a language he had
acquired during the emigration. The Count de
Panarion had been a mousquetaire gris. He
was glad enough now, to do hack-work for a
bookseller in the Rue St. Jacques. Monsieur
de Fontanges had been a Knight of Malta. How
he managed to earn a crust of bread now, was
not precisely known. It was a delicate subject,
and not much talked about. Madame Prudence,
indeed, once hinted to Lily that the "poor dear
man," as she called him, had been compelled to
accept a post in the orchestra of a theatre, and
played second fiddle at the Odéon for a hundred
francs a month.

The ladies were as antique and as dilapidated
as the gentlemen. They were marchionesses,
countesses, or plain mesdames, but all of noble
birth; one, Mademoiselle de Casteaunac, was a
sentimental old maid, who had been a beauty.
They were all miserably poor, hiding their heads
in cheap boarding-houses, or cheaper garrets,
or pining on the miserable pensions on the
civil list, allocated by the government for
the support of the decayed Bourbon aristocracy,
and the sparse funds of which were supplemented
every year by a grand ball at the Hôtel de Ville.
The sentimental old maid had but one aspiration.
She had an income amounting to the magnificent
sum of twenty-five pounds a year. If she could
only manage to raise it to forty (a thousand
francs), they would receive her as a nun in one
of the gloomiest and rigidest convents of the
Faubourg St. Germain. It was not a bright
prospect, but poor Sister Anne gazed at it
wistfully from the tower of her spinsterhood. To be
allowed to have your hair cut off, and to wear
black serge and a veil; to be permitted to sleep
on the boards, and scarify yourself with a horse-
hair vest, get up in the middle of the night to
repeat the lamentations of Jeremiah, and subsist
chiefly on stale bread and black radishes, and
scourge yourself twice a week! Well, there are
ambitions of various kinds, and Mademoiselle de
Casteaunac's ambition extended no further than
this. But she was deficient in her budget just
fifteen pounds per annum, and her long-coveted
bliss was unattainable. It is a practical age,
indeed, when maceration costs money, and the
treasurer of the vestal virgins expects a novice
to come prepared with a compact sum in the
Three per Cents.

These poor old people came and paid a feeble,
fluttering court to Madame de Kergolay. She
had lent—that is to say given—most of them
money; the name she bore was honoured and
famous, and they accorded her a sincere and
awful homage. Of all the victims of the dreadful