Life at Greenlands was very quiet. The scholar and his daughter were a modern Prospero and Miranda, with trim maid-servants to wait upon them instead of Caliban; and the new Miranda’s life was not much less lonely than that of her prototype on the enchanted isle. Mademoiselle de Bergerac had very few friends and no acquaintance. She had never been to school, and she had scarcely heard the names of those pleasures and excitements which are the necessities of fashionable damsels. To take tea with the curate’s daughters, under the walnut-trees in the prettiest corner of the lawn, was a delightful festivity; to picnic at Burnham Beeches with her father and two or three chosen friends was a matter of almost bewildering excitement; to creep along by the willowy margin of the river in her own light skiff, while her father sat in the stern reciting some of Victor Hugo’s noblest verses for her edification, was a quiet rapture above and beyond all those unknown pleasures of whose existence she was vaguely conscious. Never was maiden better pleased with her own life and her own surroundings than Helen de Bergerac. She had the Gallic vivacity of disposition, the sanguine, romantic temperament of the Celt. She adored her father, and adored the fair English country, and the river, and her dog, and Greenlands; and it was only sometimes, in a tender reverie, that she pictured to herself sunnier lands,--the vineyards of Provence, the towers and steeples of Norman cities, the broad blue waters of the Seine, broken by islets of tender green, and curving like a silver bow, by valley and woodland, chalky cliff and quaint nestling town, gray rock and mediæval castle, half-fortress, half-château. Mademoiselle de Bergerac thought of this romantic land sometimes, and sighed for a state of things that might bring about her father’s return to his native country. For the exiled family she entertained a sentiment that was akin to adoration, confounding all distinction between _famille aînée_ and _famille cadette_; and beholding in the quiet country gentlemen of Twickenham and Bushey the direct descendants of that bold warrior whose white plume flashed like a star athwart the serried ranks at Fontenoy.