"So very natural!" exclaimed Mademoiselle. "I tell you, my girl, that my brother has it not in his nature to feel jealousy of a neighbour; and I tell you also that my brother will in time give good weavers to your father and to all of the same occupation in this neighbourhood. If the suspicion you speak of were natural, it would be for my brother to feel it; yet, I will take you among his men without fear, if we find that they have tulips and auriculas." Before Charlotte had quite ventured to look again in Mademoiselle's face, M. Gaubion came in, and gave her the address of several of his men who were as fond of flowers as herself. When she gaily asked him if he was afraid of the Miss Culvers being admitted to intercourse with persons who were working for him, he smiled and added the address of a woman who was weaving velvet of a particularly curious pattern, which he thought the young ladies might like to see. This woman might have auriculas too, for aught M. Gaubion knew; and the party set out to ascertain the point. Mrs. Ellis was found at her loom, and overheard to be scolding lustily till her visitors popped their heads through the gap by which the stairs opened into the room. Her natural tone of voice was not immediately recoverable, and she spoke in something between a whine and a scream, which suited ill with the languid air with which she hung her head aside, and fumbled with the gilt locket which hung by a worn hair-chain round her neck. She had so much the appearance of an actress of the lowest grade, that Mademoiselle thought there could be no mistake in conjecturing that she had not always pursued her present occupation, nor offence in asking how the confinement suited her health. She had sat at the loom, she said, since she was the age of that boy,--pointing to a lad who had evidently been the object of her wrath. Not that she had had work all that time. O, no! She had suffered her share from want of work. Indeed, it was hard to tell which was worst for the health;--the load on the spirits of having no work, or the fatigue of weaving. If the ladies would believe her, it was a killing occupation. It sat very hard upon her stomach, and her heart turned half round; and her lungs,--O, if they knew what lungs she had! "You let us know that before we came up to see you," observed Mademoiselle. "If you think your lungs weak, is it not a pity that you should exert them as you did just now? And, this minute, you spoke much louder than we need trouble you to do." "Ah! ma'am, 'tis the way with my voice. When it once gets up, I can't, somehow, get it down again."