While Mrs Mason, the governess, following with the party, would sedulously express assent, at due intervals, by word or sign, to the statements of the baronet; not seldom addressing to the young lady beside her some comment of her own, or improving inference, such as Mrs Trimmer had recently brought into educational vogue. It might have been that Rose on these occasions sometimes caught her brother’s eye, so that her absorbed face and lighted look would grow all at once intensely demure, or she had to turn away to hide a smile at his air of exaggerated attention; while Mr Thorpe was usually so deep in abstraction, or had wandered so far, as to be in danger of their leaving him altogether behind. It was all one storm of spectacle and excitement, in fact, to the two; antique memories mingling in it with the record of fearful deeds, and quaint traces of rude manners with the grandeur of the church, the magnificence of the days of great kings—it only added zest to the living rush of the streets, the foreign faces and unaccustomed accents, the endless variety of movement that shone, flickered, or darkened every way about them. Then, slowly extricated from fetid lanes and old overhanging houses, patched, and stained, and ruinous, where the low-stretched cord of the street lantern showed that carriages seldom passed, they would wheel out suddenly from the rough causeway and its filthy middle-gutter, into the broad light and sunny air of the verdurous boulevards, where the ramparts of old Paris ran. So as the sounds of wheels grew soft, and they rolled leisurely along, the girl and her brother would look to each other, with something of the same feeling; her eyes would sparkle, while Charles’s were everywhere: when on either side of the curving vista, either way lost to sight, and heaped with the motion of equipages and riders, the showering elm-leaves and blossoming lime-twigs rose green ’gainst the tall, bright, ornate houses, tinted variously, and dappled fitfully by the shade—where the scattered passengers lounged, the loitering groups mingled, and all was open-air existence—while the gay shop-windows and café signs shone beneath the boughs, the open upper-casements seemed to drink coolness beneath their striped canopies through green-barred jalousies, the double shutter-frames were thrown out either way against the wall, and no care, no business appeared to hang on Paris far as eye could reach, as it thickened there through the swimming light of afternoon. To Rose and Charles it left no dissatisfactions about Stoke, nor regret for the smoke of London; and instead of wishing the place of their residence settled soon, although neither had confided it to the other, they would fain, no doubt, have had their father decide on staying where they were, so as to fulfil the suggestion of the worthy concierge, by making acquaintances and going into society. The truth was, that they were unconsciously somewhat conspicuous; whether it was that the full, fair,