I tried on that morning, by every means in my power, to make Ange like her former self, but it was in vain. She laughed, it is true, and when we pulled her down the steep hills, the crimson blood mantled in her peachy cheeks and made her beautiful, but there was a sense of care underlying the laughter that spoilt the joyousness of its echo, and the colour faded too fast after each exertion to have been called there by healthy exercise. The grottoes we were about to visit extended for a great distance under the grounds of Monsieur de Condé, whose property they were, and who charged a certain sum for admission to them. They had been discovered by some workmen whilst excavating on his estate, and had been quite a source of profit to their owner ever since. The visitors to St. Pucelle, naturally, had already heard a great deal about these famous grottoes, and Sophy Markham ‘gushed’ over them to her heart’s content. ‘Oh! I am so _anxious_ to see them! I am anticipating so much pleasure from this little excursion!’ she exclaimed, with a violent and most palpable squeeze of Mr. Charteris’s arm. ‘I have been looking over the book in the hotel where visitors have written down their impressions of them, and they are so terribly tantalising. A Persian describes himself as having been suddenly transported into fairyland—didn’t he, Lizzie dear?—positively into fairyland, and says he can compare the vast caverns to nothing but the palace of his great master the sultan, and the forms of the stalactites to lovely houris frozen around him. Isn’t it poetical? _Frozen houris!_ Oh! I do love poetry so! It is the very life of my soul.’ Tessie laughed quietly. ‘I’m afraid if you do not lessen your anticipations, Miss Markham, that you will be disappointed. I went over the grotto years ago with some friends, but I saw nothing at all like “frozen houris” there.’ ‘Ah! but then, my dear Tessie, you are not imaginative. Now, I _am_. I always have been, and it is my _métier_ to make the very best of everything I see. You don’t blame me for it, or think me foolish, Mr. Charteris, do you?’ Of course Mr. Charteris assured her that folly and herself were the two things in his ideas farthest removed from one another, and just as he had given vent to this opinion, we came in sight of the mouth of the grotto, where two _guides_, each bearing a petroleum lamp, awaited our arrival. They tendered us little hats made of grey linen, each trimmed with a cockade and a bunch of red feathers in front, very much after the pattern of those adopted by the monkeys on the organs, and for which we were expected to exchange those we wore, which were liable to be damaged by the drippings from the cave. They were comical-looking head-dresses, and I hardly wondered at Mrs. Carolus and the fair Sophia hesitating to surmount their hard-lined and puckered faces by them, although Ange and Tessie looked all the prettier from the contrast.