The next day they left Boulogne, after many farewell injunctions from the Berthiers, and much weeping on the part of Blanche and her sisters. Blanche stood for a long time with Madeleine, who held the little Jeanne in her arms, waving farewell to her kindred on the wharf, and watching the shores of France recede from her gaze. When the last vestige of land disappeared in the wintry fog and she found herself shut in by the shoreless sea, she turned away with a feeling of hopeless weariness. She had a morbid presentiment that she was leaving home forever. XIII Mrs. Tate ran her eyes over the pile of letters at her plate on the breakfast-table. She was a large, florid woman of forty, verging on stoutness, with an abundance of reddish-brown hair. "What a lot of mail!" she said to her husband, who was absorbed in reading the "Daily Telegraph,"--a small man, with black hair and moustache tinged with gray, and small black eyes finely wrinkled at the corners. "Here's a letter from Amy dated at Cannes. They must have left Paris sooner than they intended; and here's something from Fanny Mayo,--an invitation to dinner, I suppose. Fanny told me she wanted us to meet the Presbreys next week,--some people she knew in Bournemouth." "Fanny's always taking up new people," said Tate from behind his paper, "and dropping them in a month." "And here's something else with a French stamp on it. Let me see. From Boulogne? It must be from Father Dumény. Yes, I recognize the handwriting." "Another subscription, I suppose," her husband grunted. "He hasn't written for nearly a year. I wonder what started him this time. What a dear old soul he is! Do you remember the night we took him out to a restaurant in Paris and he was so afraid of being seen? I always laugh when I think of that." "What's he got to say?" With her knife, Mrs. Tate cut one end of the letter open, and her eye wandered slowly down the page. "He's been ill, he says, but he's able to be about now. He came near running over here last summer, but he couldn't get away." For a few moments Mrs. Tate was absorbed in reading; then she exclaimed with a curious little laugh: "How funny! Listen to this, will you? He's left what he really wrote for till the end,--like a woman. He wants us to look after a _protégée_ of his, a girl that he baptized, the daughter of an acrobat. Did you ever hear of such a thing? She's in the circus herself, and she's going to appear at the Hippodrome next week. She performs on the trapeze, and then she dives backward from the roof of the building--backward, mind you! Could anything be more terrible?" "I should think she'd be right in your line," Tate replied without lifting his eyes from his paper. "She'll be something new. You can make a lion of her."