keep his house when he had one,—but most to Charles, with his rough boy’s jokes; even although the girl’s thoughts wandered the more irresistibly to foreign counts and picturesque barons that had hovered in vision before the whole boarding-school, being now eagerly inquired after by her dearest friend, who was still there. There were none of these, certainly, about the highway which the carriage struck into, alive though it was with people of every kind. Charles had ceased, at his mother’s unusually earnest request, to whistle indistinctly between his teeth, as it was of all sounds the one that most annoyed her; he had even left off, of his own accord, the substitution of a drumming motion with a small cane against his boot, as he superciliously noticed the passengers. He got quite silent, in fact, to watch the passing faces that seemed bent towards Paris; though the faint smoke of another large village appeared in the hollow, prettier than any they had passed, among inclining vineyards and whole knolls of roses. It might have been St Genevieve’s own, with that holy well resorted to by kings, where she had kept her sheep long ago; and where, at the May fête of _la rosière_, they still crowned the most virtuous girl in the place with roses; as the last work of Madame de Genlis had informed Mrs Mason. The summer afternoon sloped wide above it, full of light and the swarming hum of insects, through the outspread walnut leaves, flickering amber in the sun, from over the white wall that was dappled by the shadows; while the hedgeless corn-fields on the other side were rippling under the long air from the woods, one sea of tenderest green, full of blue-cockle flowers and scarlet poppies; the cottage casements flashed from amidst a pink-white glow of orchard-blossom, of milky cherry-boughs, of old rugged propped-up pear-trees that foamed over to the moss-green thatch, with the wooden chimney shot high, as it breathed blue among the leaves; with here and there a hooded dovecot window on the roof, where the pigeons sat sunning and swelling themselves, and cooing, white, blue, and purple together, in a gush of warm light—all the place beneath them bespattered and splashed with whiteness, through the shadow, to the very foliage of the nearest branch. The hum of the place burst round them as they crossed its little bridge, rattling over the rough causeway; and there were no carriage-ways save through the villages and towns.