‘The poor child!—no, not precisely; not as to name and place. But it was to an English lady she went—I heard as much as that; for, as I said just now, Dumarques spoke more freely to me than to others. An elderly English lady, an invalid, was passing through Rouen with her brother, also elderly and English—she a maiden lady, he a bachelor. The lady’s maid had fallen ill on the journey. They had been travelling in Italy, Switzerland, heaven knows where, and the lady was in sore want of an attendant; but she would have no common person, no peasant girl who talked loud and ate garlic; she must have a young person of some refinement, conversable—in brief, almost a lady. Her brother applied to the master of the hotel. The master of the hotel knew something of André Dumarques, and knew that he wanted to find situations for his daughters. “I have the very thing at the ends of my fingers,” he said, and sent his porter upon the spot with a note to Monsieur Dumarques, asking him to bring one of his daughters. Félicie had been pining ever since her mother’s death. She was most anxious to leave her home. She accompanied her father to the hotel. The old lady saw her, was delighted with her, and engaged her on the spot. That was how Félicie left Rouen.’ ‘Did you ever see her again?’ ‘Yes, and how sorely changed! It was at least six years afterwards; and I had almost forgotten that poor child’s existence. André Dumarques was dead; he had died leaving a nice little fortune behind him,—the fruit of deprivations that must have rendered his life a burden, poor man,—and his eldest daughter, Hortense, kept the house. Julie had also gone into service soon after Félicie left home. Hortense had kept her father’s house ever since her mother’s death. She kept it still, though there was now no father for whom to keep it. She must have been very lonely, and though the house was a picture of neatness, it had a melancholy air. Mademoiselle Dumarques kept three or four cats, and one old servant who had been in the family for years; no one ever remembered her being young, not even I, who approach the age of my great countryman, Voltaire.’ ‘And she came back—Félicie?’ asked Lucius, somewhat exercised in spirit by the watchmaker’s _longueurs_.