unconscious of being a plagiarist; he had got into a way of sucking his friend’s brains, until he honestly thought they were his own. This intellectual piracy is not so rare, perhaps, as at first sight you may imagine. It would be a curious revelation if our own minds could be laid bare to us, and we were enabled to see how far their workings are original and how far imitative. We should, I fancy, be startled to find how small a proportion the former bears to the latter, and how much that we consider the spontaneous operation of our minds is, in reality, but the reflex of the minds of others, and the unconscious reproduction of thoughts and ideas that are suggested by things outside of us. Franceline’s _bonne_, as she still called her, though Angélique had passed from that single capacity into the complex position of butler, cook, housemaid, lady’s maid, and general factotum at The Lilies, was as complete a contrast to a name as ever mortal presented. A gaunt, high-cheek-boned, grizzly-haired woman, with a squint and a sharp, aggressive chin, every inch of her body protested against the mockery that had labelled her angelic. She had a gruff voice like a man’s, and a trick of tossing her head and falling back in her chair when she answered you that had gained her the nickname of the French grenadier amongst the rising generation of Dullerton. Yet the kernel of this rough husk was as tender and mellow as a peach, and differed from the outer woman as much as the outer woman differed from her name. When the small boys followed her round the market, laughing at her under her very nose, and accompanying their vernacular comments with very explicative gestures, the French grenadier had not the heart to stop the performance by sending the actors to the right-about, as she might have done with one shake of her soldier-like fist; but if they had dared to look crooked at Franceline, or play off the least of their tricks on M. de la Bourbonais, she would have punched their heads for them, and sent them off yelling with broken noses without the smallest compunction. Angélique had found a husband in her youth, and when he died she had transferred all her wifely solicitude to her master and his wife and child. She could have given him no greater proof of it than by leaving her native village and following him to his foreign home; yet she never let him suspect that the sacrifice cost her a pang. She was of a social turn, and it was no small trial to be shut out from neighborly chat by her ignorance of the language. She took it out, to be sure, with the count and Franceline, and with the few intimates of The Lilies who spoke French; but, let her improve these opportunities as she might, there was still a great gap in her social life. Conversation with ladies and gentlemen was one thing, and a good gossip with a neighbor was another. But Angélique kept this grief to herself, and never complained. With M. le Curé, as she dubbed Father