My next task was to get the Count de Salins to bring Mariette and her mother to spend a day at our cottage; and I quietly prompted Father Bonneville to ask the whole party, in his own name, for the Monday following, when the count’s class did not meet. Etiquette, and ceremonies, and conventionalities, were very much laid aside at this time amongst the poor French emigrants. We had so much need of all the comforts and sympathies of social life, such scanty means of keeping up the stately reserves which had previously existed in France—covering, it must be confessed, a multitude of glaring vices—that we were glad to seize upon any occasion of enjoying a little friendly intercourse in a land where we were generally poor, and strangers, and by the great mass of the vulgar utterly despised. The invitation was accepted frankly, and I set to work to devise how the day might be made to pass pleasantly for all parties. I had a very beautiful garden, now rich in flowers, and a gate at the back opened into some pleasant fields. There was nothing very striking in the scenery around, but there was a soft rural beauty rarely to be met with, so near a great capital. I planned walks in directions which we were not destined to take. I decorated our two sitting-rooms with nosegays of the flowers which Mariette had loved in childhood. I laid her little book of reading-lessons on the table, and a withered violet beside it, which she had given to me in its beauty, and which I had kept ever after between the leaves of the book. I arranged every thing, in short, as far as possible, to carry her mind back to the past, and, in my own eagerness, I felt very much like a child again myself. One thing, however, I avoided. Neither in the dinner I had ordered, nor in any of the arrangements did I suffer any thing like great expense, or an attempt at display, to appear. Every thing was simple, though every thing was comfortable and good. As I went about early in the morning, busying myself with a thousand trifles, I could see Father Bonneville’s eyes following me, while a quiet smile played about his lips. I saw that he comprehended, in some degree at least, what was going on in my heart, and that he did not even care to conceal his amusement at the eagerness which, if he had ever known, he knew no longer. The morning was as bright and beautiful as could be. Nature seemed to smile upon me. There might be a few clouds, but they were only such as fancy sometimes brings over a happy heart. There had been a light shower, indeed, in the night, but it had only sufficed to lay the dust and soften the ground, and render the rich unequalled verdure of England the more brilliant.