Mademoiselle Bourde lingered--he didn't know why, unless it was to make him feel, with her smooth, finished French assurance, which had the manner of extreme benignity, that she was following him up. He sometimes wondered whether she copied Mrs. Temperly or whether Mrs. Temperly tried to copy her. Presently she said, slowly rubbing her hands and smiling at him: 'You will have plenty of time. We shall be long in Paris.' 'Perhaps you will be disappointed,' Raymond suggested. 'How can we be--unless _you_ disappoint us?' asked the governess, sweetly. He left her without ceremony: the imitation was probably on the part of Cousin Maria. III 'Only just ourselves,' her note had said; and he arrived, in his natural impatience, a few moments before the hour. He remembered his Cousin Maria's habitual punctuality, but when he entered the splendid _salon_ in the quarter of the Parc Monceau--it was there that he had found her established--he saw that he should have it, for a little, to himself. This was pleasing, for he should be able to look round--there were admirable things to look at. Even to-day Raymond Bestwick was not sure that he had learned to paint, but he had no doubt of his judgment of the work of others, and a single glance showed him that Mrs. Temperly had 'known enough' to select, for the adornment of her walls, half a dozen immensely valuable specimens of contemporary French art. Her choice of other objects had been equally enlightened, and he remembered what Dora had said to him five years before--that her mother wished them to have the best. Evidently, now they had got it; if five years was a long time for him to have delayed (with his original plan of getting off so soon) to come to Paris, it was a very short one for Cousin Maria to have taken to arrive at the highest good.