“So René Dampierre has grown into a handsome man, has he?” said Mrs. Burbage, when Anne went to her room. She was sitting up in bed, with a shawl thrown round her shoulders. Her face was yellow and pinched, but the eyes that looked out from under the wasted forehead, were sharp and keen as ever. “Well! so he ought. His mother was a beautiful creature, and his father was well enough, as men go. Jacques Dampierre was quite a celebrated man in Paris, thirty years ago, when I used to visit them. A writer; a novelist, I believe. I never read any of his books. In those days it wasn’t considered the correct thing for young women to read French novels. And quite right too. They’re all disgraceful. “René’s a painter, you say? Well! much good may it do him. He won’t make money that way, though I suppose he must have come into a decent income through his father. He’s an only son.” “His father is dead then?” Anne asked. “Yes, my dear, dead long ago. He died a year after his wife, and that’s fourteen years now. She was a Leslie, one of the old stock, and as I say, a lovely girl. Fair, is he? Like his mother then. Hers was the only real gold hair I ever saw. And she had brown eyes, like a deer, or a fawn, or some creature of that sort.” Anne remembered the brown eyes that ought to have been blue. He had his mother’s eyes as well as her hair then, evidently. “Let me see, René must be twenty-seven or twenty-eight by this time,” the old lady went on. “I haven’t seen him since he was a baby of five or so. He was a pretty boy, then. They sent him over here to be educated, at that Catholic place. Beaumont isn’t it? He ought to be quite an Englishman, and I hope he is.” “Well, he speaks English perfectly, with only the very slightest accent. But I don’t think he’s at all like an Englishman,” said Anne. “In manner, I mean,” she added. “Humph! More’s the pity. I don’t like foreigners.” Anne was silent. She thought she did. “He brought friends, you say? Well, tell them to come whenever they like, my dear. You’re quite old enough to look after them. Catherine Leslie--Dampierre, I mean, was a good friend to me. I should like to show hospitality to her boy.” She turned over on the pillow, her voice growing weak. “That will do, Anne. Nurse will see to me. I can’t talk ten minutes now without this dreadful faintness.” The nurse came up to the bed, and Anne stepped aside, pausing at the door, to throw a pitying glance at the sharp profile against the pillow. The old lady was growing visibly weaker, and Anne sorrowed. She was so lonely, so desolate at the end of life. Childless, almost friendless, for brusque and downright in manner, she had never possessed the happy art of engaging the affection of others, she was going down to the grave almost unregarded.