It was on my tongue to tell her that fire and soldiery had wiped it even with the ground, during the "Terror." But she interrupted me. Setting down her work-basket, which was heaped high with reels and parti-coloured rags of silk, she pushed a small table over to the big bed and loaded it with candlesticks. There were three candles already alight in the room, but she lit others and set them in line--brass candlesticks, plated candlesticks, candlesticks of chinaware--fourteen candlesticks in all, and fresh candles in each. Laying a finger on her lip, she stepped to the big bed and unfastened the corking-pins which held the green curtains together. As she pushed the curtains back I lifted myself on an elbow. It was into a real theatre that I looked. She had transformed the whole level of the bed into a miniature stage, with buildings of cardboard, cleverly painted, and gardens cut out of silk and velvet and laid down, and rose-trees gummed on little sticks, and a fish-pond and brook of looking-glass, with embroidered flowers stuck along their edges, and along the paths (of real sand) a score of little dolls walking, all dressed in the uniform of the Grey Nuns. I declare it was so real, you could almost hear the fountain playing, with its _jet d'eau_ of transparent beads strung on an invisible wire. "But how pretty, mademoiselle!" I cried. She clasped her hands nervously. "But is it _like_, Yann? It is so long ago that I may have forgotten. Tell me if it is like; or if there is anything wrong. I promise not to be offended." "It is exactly like, mademoiselle." "See, here is the Mother Superior; and this is Soeur Gabrielle. I have to make the dresses full and stiff, or they wouldn't stand up. And that, with the blue eyes, is Soeur Hyacinthe. She walks with me-- this is I--as she always did. And what do you think? With the fifteen dolls that you have brought I am going to have a real Pardon, and townspeople and fisher people to stand and worship at the altar of the Virgin, there in the corner. I made it of wax, and stamped the face with a seal that Charles gave me. He was to have been my husband when I left the school." "Indeed, mademoiselle?" "Yes, but the soldiers burnt his house. It was but a week after I left the school, and the Chateau Sant-Ervoan lay but a mile from my mother's house. He fled to us, wounded; and we carried him to the coast--there was a price on his head, and we, too, had to flee--and escaped over to England. He died on this bed, Yann. Look--" She lifted a candle, and there on the bed's ledge I read, in gilt lettering, some words I have never forgotten, though it was not until years after that I got a priest to explain them to me. They were "C. DE. R. COMES ET ECSUL. MDCCXCIII." While I stared, she set the candle down again and gently drew the curtains round the bed.