Mrs. Fétis shrugged her shoulders with a doubtful air. She often talked rapturously of La Belle France, raved of her sunny south, that gracious city of Périgord where she had been born and reared to the age of fifteen. Yet for all the common purposes of life she had liked London a great deal better. "There is nothing I should love so much," she protested. "But 'twould be madness to leave a house in which we have sunk all our means and our labour with the hope of getting our reward by a competence in our old age. Indeed, sir, we could not afford to leave Poland Street." "Not if you were amply provided for elsewhere?" asked Topsparkle. "Ah, sir, to be provided for by others--by a kind of pension from a wealthy benefactor for instance," looking at him searchingly, as if she were measuring his capacity for generosity, "that is all very well for poor-spirited people--the English lower classes have no pride. But my husband and I are of an independent mind. We would rather have our liberty even in poverty than be pensioners upon any one's bounty, which might be withdrawn at a day's notice." "Nay, a pension of that kind to be useful must be assured to you--something in the way of an annuity in the public funds, for instance--dependent on your own lives, and not upon any one else's frail thread of existence." Mrs. Fétis looked interested, and almost convinced. "'Twould be a delicious life and free from care; but Fétis has a passion for London, and all whom I love in my own country are dead. It would be but to go back to their graves." Mr. Topsparkle said no more. He did not want to appear over anxious to banish his old servant, yet the man's tone to-day and the wife's revelations had intensified a feeling he had entertained for a long time, a feeling that the hour had come when it would be very agreeable to get rid of his _âme damnée_. He would suffer considerable inconvenience undoubtedly from the loss of a valet who so thoroughly understood his complexion; but anything was better than the everlasting vicinity of a servant who knew too much. He dismissed the Frenchwoman with a compliment, escorted her to the ante-room, and kissed her hand with a finished courtesy before he committed her to the care of the footman, and then he went back to his sofa, warmed his feet at the log-fire, and gave himself up to a serious thought.