It was the course, if he had known it, just calculated to make me care for him, if only out of pique, and accordingly I began to watch for his coming, to wonder whether he would ask me to walk with him, and to dress so as to please his eye. I began to take an interest in the farm and garden, as indeed I had been used to do at home, and I was more than ever zealous in visiting and working for the school and the poor folks. My aunt had taken to me at once, and I to her, and I believe but for the meddling of another we should never have had a falling out. My charitable work and my studies with Rosamond and my mother had again brought my better self uppermost, and despite Betty's teasing and an occasional sigh for London, or a spasm of home-sickness for dear Normandy, I was very happy. I have said that Betty set herself to make mischief, and she succeeded certainly to her heart's content, or one would have thought so. She is gone to her account long ago, poor thing, and I feel tenderly toward her memory, for she was my Andrew's sister; but I cannot make my story understood without speaking of her faults. She began with Jeanne. The housekeeper and chief personage under Margaret was an old woman named Deborah Permuen, an excellent person, but of somewhat irritable temper, and very jealous of her authority and her influence with her mistress. She and Jeanne had begun by being great friends; for Deborah was a hot Protestant, and a Presbyterian to boot, who, though she regularly attended the parish church on Sundays, as regularly went on Thursdays to a gathering of her own sort of folks, which was held in a cottage on the verge of the estate. She even condescended to learn of Jeanne how to prepare an "omelette aux herbs" and several other French dishes, imparting in return various important culinary secrets of her own. By degrees, however, her friendship cooled. She began to throw out hints about interlopers, and French Jesuits in disguise coming to interfere in peaceable families. She declined anything but civilly a proposition of Jeanne's to teach her the true way of making a galette; and at last—the crowning offence—threw into the pig's mess a fine salad with crawfish, which Jeanne had prepared for Andrew's birthday, declaring that she would not have her young master poisoned with French pig-wash. Jeanne rushed to my mother with complaints, not observing or not heeding that my aunt was in the next room looking over a drawer of linen in the cabinet. Then Deborah was called upon the scene, and told her story, which she did with many tears and exclamations that ever she should have lived to see the day that she should be supplanted by a foreigner, and so on. "You foolish old woman, what do you mean?" said my aunt, out of patience at last. "Who is thinking of supplanting you?"