“_Tais-toi, coquine_!” cried madame sharply. “The pair of you had been well committed to the Foundling.” She treated with vast indulgence generally this pretty child of her adoption. It seemed only that this particular subject was fraught with alarm to her. By-and-by, when the queer meal was ended (there had been present at it, besides the ladies and Mr Sheridan, three silent Bœotians--_concordia discors_: practical scientists attached to the household, and now admitted, _à l’Egalité_, to a share in its social rites), madame conducted her guest to her boudoir over the front porch, and opened upon him with the matter momentarily nearest her heart. “Does it magnify itself to my eyes, this--the shadow of the tower?” she said. “I do not know. It was not so at Barse, where we arrive first; but heere--heere! The place oppresses me. Its antiquity is a rebuke to the frothy dynasties. Every whisper is from a ghost of the past bidding us of the new mode to begone. We are hated, tracked, and watched. I see faces behind trees; I heere mutterings through the walls. What have we to do in this haunted town?” “It is the burying-place of kings,” said Mr Sheridan. “It should be to your taste.” Madame la comtesse had no echo for levity. She seemed quite genuinely agitated. Her trick (pronounced eternal by one that detested her) of advertising the beauty of her hand and arm by toying, while she conversed, with a fillet of packthread, as if it were a harp string, was exchanged now for an incessant nervous handling of a little miniature Bastille, carved from a fallen stone of the original, that hung upon her bosom. Her face--pretty yet, though narrowing down to an over-small chin--seemed even yellow, drawn, and affrayed. This appearance was partly due, no doubt, to the fact that she wore no rouge. She had once made a vow to quit its use at the age of thirty, and now at forty-five she was yet true to her word. Indeed, she was the very _dévote_ of Minerva-worship. She sighed, “That I, whom Nature intended for the cloister, should have to fight always against the snares and the wickedness! I sink. Was there evaire the time when my flesh not preek to the fright? Oh yes, once when I was vain! It is vanity that make the good _armure_. I had no thought but levity when I marry M. de Genlis--and afterwards during the years of Passy, of Villers-Cotterets, of the Rue de Richelieu! Then I have no fear of the morrow; I have no fear at all but of the too-ardent lover.” “It must have been an ever-present fear,” said Mr Sheridan gravely. She shook her head with hardly a laugh.