When Jane stood at her window and looked across the sea, she saw what might have been a picture of life at Luttrell Marches during those first few days. Such a smooth stretch of water, pleasant to the eye, where blue and green, amethyst, grey and silver came and went, and under the play of colour and the shifting light and shade of day and evening, the unchanging black of rocks which showed for an instant and then left one guessing whether anything had really broken the beauty and the peace. Over the surface all was pleasant enough, but incidents, some of them almost negligible in themselves, kept recurring to remind Jane that there were rocks beneath the sea. The first incident came up suddenly whilst she was writing Lady Heritage’s letters on the second day. She had beside her a little pile of correspondence, mostly about trifles. Upon each letter there was scrawled, “Yes”—“No”—“Tell them I’ll think it over,” or some such direction. Presently Jane arrived at a letter in French, upon which Lady Heritage had written, “Make an English translation and enclose to Mrs. Blunt.” Mrs. Blunt’s own letter lay immediately underneath. It contained inquiries about some conditions of factory labour amongst women in France. The French letter was an excellent exposition of the said conditions. Jane sat looking at it, and wondering whether Renata could have translated a single line of it, and how much ignorance it would behove her to display. After a moment’s thought she turned round and said timidly, “May I have a dictionary, please?” Lady Heritage looked up from the papers before her. She frowned and said: “A dictionary?” “Yes, for the French letter.” “You don’t know French, then?” Jane met the half-sarcastic look with protest. “Oh yes, I _do_. But, if I might have a dictionary——” Lady Heritage pointed to the bookcase and went back to her papers. An imp of mischief entered into Jane. She took the dictionary and spent the next half-hour in producing a translation with just the right amount of faults in it. She put it down in front of her employer with a feeling of triumph. “Please, will this do?” Lady Heritage looked, frowned, and tore the paper across. “I thought you said you knew French?” Jane fidgeted with her pen: “Of course I know I’m not _really_ good at it, but I looked out all the words I didn’t know.” “There must have been a good many,” was Lady Heritage’s comment, and the imp made Jane raise innocent eyes and say: “Oh, there _were_!” She went back to her table, and Lady Heritage spoke over her shoulder to Mr. Ember, who appeared to be searching for a book at the far end of the room. She spoke in French—the low, rapid French of the woman to whom one language is the same as another.