passionately stamping her foot upon the floor in her paroxysm of wounded pride and feeling. In her usual condition Mademoiselle would have been bitterly ashamed of that stamp upon the floor. She was even now, in the fumes of her passion, and blushed for herself, clenching her hands, which was a noiseless operation, to stay in herself any possible repetition of that _bêtise_. All good feeling, all honour, all justice even, forbade that a woman should be jeered at for circumstances she could not help, circumstances which her strength lay in making the best of, in taking the sting out of by a dignified acceptance of them, in which there should be neither question nor assumption of injury, nor the pose of a person wronged. Above all things that pose of wrong was abhorrent to Claire. It went against her pride to acknowledge that she was in an inferior position, a dependant, and in the cold shade. Her pride had been to ignore all that, to define her place as clearly as possible, and make it fully comprehensible that it was the place which she chose and that pleased her best. To remark upon it at all, as Mr Charles Wargrave had done, even though in a way that was intended to be flattering, was very bad taste, to say the least; but to end these remarks by such a suggestion, by an offensive jest, was an insult in every sense of the word. Her blood boiled in her veins. She walked up and down the room to wear out as far as she could the exasperation that possessed her, not stamping her foot any more, which was a humiliating confession of weakness, but pacing up and down because she was incapable of keeping quiet. A woman who had always avoided any folly of so-called sensitiveness, who had accepted everything with a smiling face, never murmured, never taken offence, consented to be Mademoiselle, and to dignify the title by the perfect philosophy of her self-adaptation to it--and after all these years, after all these heroisms, after her proud self-denials and self-subjugation, to be thus insulted! a sneer flung full in her face, a dart of contempt to her heart! Mademoiselle felt as if that sneer had struck her like a blow. Her face burned with the smart of it: she had the sensation of the physical shock as well as of the rush of blood to the brain which is its result.