But here come the boys back with their finished tasks; and little Cecy is at the door, with her stepmother’s compliments, and are you fond of curds and cream? If so, you will come to the dairy and eat them, with a dish of strawberries, gathered by Dame Alice herself when the morning dew was yet on them, and carefully kept for you until this moment on the coolest shelf of the cool dark pantry. MARIE JEANNE D’AUMALE A Little Schoolgirl of Saint-Cyr PART I. The little “new” girl had sobbed herself to sleep at last, and in all the long, white dormitory there was no sound but that of the regular breathing of healthy, sleeping children. Very gently, Madame de Fontaine withdrew her hand from the lock of the little fingers which had held it so long. Then, as she stooped to kiss the small face on the tear-stained pillow, she heard a murmur of “Maman!” and saw that the child was smiling in her sleep. “She is dreaming of home,” said Madame de Fontaine to herself; and, involuntarily, she turned to the unshuttered window, when she was back in her cell at the end of the dormitory, and yielded her own dreams to the spells the white moon was weaving for them. Away across the park, long cords of light were stretched across the dark mass of the Château, where a King and his courtiers held revel. Now and then, the night wind whispering to the tall trees, carried snatches of the music to which the dainty, jewelled feet of the Court ladies moved rhythmically. But these things barely touched the nun’s consciousness. Beyond the boundaries of the stately park, far away from the echoes of courtly music, or the light of a King’s presence, her dreams were following where those of little Marie Jeanne d’Aumale had led—to an old “gentilhommière” in the heart of the provinces, very shabby, and tumble-down, and dilapidated, but where a little girl could be very happy, because she called it “home.” It may well have been that more than one of the little sleepers in the long row of little white beds was dreaming of just such an old “noblesse”;[14] and that is why, as she looked into the moonlit park, the nun could see it so plainly before her. Poor little girls! Two titles had procured for them their right of entrance into Saint-Cyr: nobility of birth, and poverty; and one was more clearly written across the tumble-down walls, the grass-grown courtyard, the empty byres and stables of their old provincial “gentilhommières,” than the other on the Coat of Arms carved above the dilapidated doorway.