‘I don’t know about that, but we certainly can’t afford to lose you! However, if you are bent upon going this morning, may I go with you?’ A startled look came into her eyes. ‘Into the convent, do you mean?’ ‘No! not so far as that! Only to walk to the gates with you.’ ‘Oh! do, Hilda! I shall be very glad of your company. It is a lonely path over the hill.’ So I was mistaken, after all, and had wronged the little maid in thinking that Mr. Charteris must be her cavalier on these occasions. We walked together through the blazing light over the fern covered hill, and conversed pleasantly on all the topics that interest young women most. Once I tried to sound her on the subject of Charteris, but she shrunk from it so visibly that I had not the heart to try again. It was as if I had plunged a surgeon’s probe into a bleeding wound. When I had kissed her pretty face for the last time, and left her behind the great iron grille of the convent, I could not help believing that my former supposition was correct, and Ange was brooding over the prospect of shutting herself up for ever within its walls. This idea worried me sadly. It would be like a living death for her! And what else but the burden of a committed wrong could have made Ange’s thoughts turn that way? Could she have discovered more of her father’s pecuniary affairs than Tessie and I knew of? and did the knowledge of disgrace and debt weigh her mind down to that extent that she longed to bury herself from the sight of the world? Or did the poor child imagine that the burthen of one less to keep and provide for would be of any substantial benefit to the family purse? These questions occupied my mind for half the way back again—until I came, indeed, upon a figure in a velveteen shooting-suit, stretched out at full length upon the thyme-scented grass, and lazily inhaling the light breeze that was wafted across the stream in the valley, and just lifted occasionally a curl of dark hair from his brow. It was that of my French master, Armand, Baron de Nesselrode. I feel I have reached a point when I must make a confession—namely, that since the memorable day upon which I was frightened by the dog-wolf on the Piron road, I had received more than one French lesson from the gentleman in question. I had never made a single appointment with him for the purpose; but he seemed to be ubiquitous, and to pop up wherever I went, so that although the verbs I mastered with him were _accidentals_, I had acquired quite a remarkable fluency in conversation, and never felt at a loss to express what I meant. He said I learned quicker than anybody he had known before; but I suppose, if ‘practice makes perfect,’ there was not so much credit due to me as he would have made me believe. Once I remember I stopped to ask myself if I were studying the French language so diligently _for Tessie’s sake_, and I was fain to answer ‘No.’