The gentry of the neighborhood called in due course at The Lilies, and M. de la Bourbonais punctiliously returned the civility, and here the intercourse ended. He would accept no hospitality that he was not in a position to return. He was on very good terms with his immediate neighbors, who were none of them formidable people. There was Mr. Langrove, the vicar of Dullerton, and Father Henwick, the Catholic priest, and Miss Bulpit and Miss Merrywig, two maiden ladies, who were in their separate ways prominent institutions of the place. These four, with Sir Simon, were the only persons who could boast of being on visiting terms with the shy, polite foreigner who bowed to every old apple-woman on the road as if she were a duchess, and kept the vulgar herd of the town and the fine people of the county as much at a distance as if he were an exiled sovereign who declined to receive the homage of other subjects than his own. Franceline had been eight years at Dullerton, and was now in her seventeenth year. She was very beautiful, as she stood leaning on the garden-rail amongst the lilies, looking like a lily herself, with one dove perched upon her finger, while another alighted on her head, and cooed to it. She was neither a blonde nor a brunette, as we classify them, but a type between the two. Her complexion was of that peculiar whiteness that we see in fair northern women, Scandinavians and Poles; as clear as ivory and as colorless, the bright vermilion of the finely cut, sensitive mouth alone relieving its pallor. Yet her face was deficient neither in warmth nor light; the large, almond-shaped eyes, flashing in shadow, sometimes black, sometimes purple gray, lighted it better than the pinkest roses could have done; and if the low arch of the dark eyebrows gave a tinge of severity to it, the impression was removed by two saucy dimples that lurked in either cheek, and were continually breaking out of their hiding-places, and brightening the pensive features like a sunbeam. Franceline’s voice had a note in it that was as bright as her dimples. It rang through the brick cottage like the sound of running water; and when she laughed, it was so hearty that you laughed with her from very sympathy. Such a creature would have been in her proper sphere in a palace, treading on pink marble, and waited on by a retinue of pages. But she was not at all out of place at The Lilies; perhaps, next to the palace and pink marble, she could not have alighted in a more appropriate frame than this mossy flower-bed to which a capricious destiny had transplanted her. She seemed quite as much a fitting part of the place as the tall, majestic lilies on either side of the garden-gate. But as regarded Dullerton beyond the garden-gate, she was as much out of place as a gazelle in a herd of Alderney cows. Dullerton was the very ideal of commonplace, the embodiment of respectability and dulness--wealthy, fat-of-the-land dulness; if a prize had been set up for