The widow, though greatly distressed at his death, took some comfort in the thought that she had protected him, at all events during the last decade of his life, from the numerous frauds and impostors who were for ever draining him of his substance. She was herself of a most charitable and kind disposition, but she possessed a certain shrewdness and a power of discrimination which in matters of charity had been lacking to her husband. For the first year of her widowhood she lived in great seclusion, but not in idleness, since she insisted upon concluding the banker's affairs, as far as possible, herself. It was at this time that her common-sense homely nature was extremely touched by a message of sympathy which she had received from Madame Elisabeth, with whom she had once had an audience on matters of charity. When, therefore, having yielded to the continual solicitations of her relatives in England to return, for a time at least, to her own country, she heard, by a mere coincidence, that the Princess was desirous of obtaining an escort thither for a young lady of the Court, she immediately offered her services. It was with even more than her accustomed kindness and good-nature that Madame Gaumont greeted Lucienne on the afternoon that she bore her away from the Tuileries. Her appearance was in itself a consolation. Tall and stout, but not ungainly, she carried a small head upon massive shoulders, and her eyes twinkled with amusement at the smallest provocation. Her cheerful motherly humour at once understood and felt for the girl’s dejection without losing its slightly bracing temper. It would have been plain indeed to a less sympathetic eye that Lucienne was heart-broken at leaving her beloved mistress. In the coach by Madame Gaumont’s side, and during the first hour or so after her arrival at the Hôtel de la Séguinière, the last words of the Princess and her own resolutions to be brave had sustained her. But that evening, alone in the pretty pink and white boudoir which her hostess had assigned to her, it was different. All the cables which had held her little bark to its anchorage were parting one after the other; she felt herself alone on a hostile sea. It was not only the parting with Madame Elisabeth—it was not only shrinking from the future which unnerved her; it was terror of herself, for herself. And quite suddenly the idea came to her: why not end this eternal warfare, embrace the inevitable? Why not tell Gilbert that she wished to marry him now, before she went to England?