The château at Rougemont was a delightful place to its young English inmates, entirely different to a great, formal, stiff house at home, with so many rooms on each floor, all the same size, and nothing interesting or unusual from garret to cellar. Here in the château, with its little pepper-castor towers and corkscrew staircases, they were constantly making some novel discovery, whether of a secret panel, or a secret stair, a well, a picture, or a grave. It had even been hinted that an _oubliette_ was somewhere on the premises. Rougemont far more resembled the Palace of the Sleeping Beauty, with its large kitchen and hall, long stone passages and spacious courtyard, than the orthodox establishment for young ladies. It was surrounded by a garden laid out in terraces, connected by flights of shallow steps, and ornamented with clipped yew-trees, closely resembling in shape the toy-trees of the sheepfolds of our youth, and a wonderful and varied collection of stone, plaster, and even coloured wooden statues, which burst upon the eye in the most unlooked-for and surprising manner. Madame Daverne, the English widow of a French _avocat_, was a little, thin, middle-aged woman, invariably dressed in gray, and never seen without her spectacles. She wore her still abundant dark hair in plain bandeaux--a long-exploded fashion--and no cap. Although her domestic arrangements were managed on a liberal English scale, and she believed in plenty of cold water, open windows, and _tea_, still she had lived sufficiently long in the country of her adoption to have imbibed a very strong prejudice in favour of _surveillance_, especially as regarded the young friends under her care. No idle chatter about the boys at the Lycée, of love, of lovers, was ever permitted; novels and romances were unknown and unread. The great outside world, with its sayings and doings, was an unexplored region to Madame Daverne’s pupils. Nevertheless, her six young friends found a good deal of happiness in each other’s society; they spent a very busy, healthy life--rambles in the forest, tennis, _la grâce_, and gardening were their usual amusements, and every Thursday during summer and autumn they made expeditions to Loches, Blois, Chinonceaux, Plessis les Tours, Amboise, or other places of, as Madame observed, “well-known historical interest.” More than six years had passed since the wild little Irish imp had arrived at Rougemont; and in those years what a change had come over her! How marvellously she had improved! Her gusts of passion were among the things of the past, her goat-like impulses had been subdued, her craving to ride every horse she met had long been curbed, her ignorance--who dares to talk of ignorance in connection with Madame Daverne’s most brilliant and most accomplished pupil?