But Helen went home displeased and uncomfortable--displeased with herself: for what did it matter to her if some Englishman, whose very name she had never heard, should adapt himself to the special point in which French domestic arrangements are repugnant to the English mind? It was nothing to her. If he pleased Thérèse and Thérèse pleased him, and everybody else was pleased, what had Helen to do with it? But it is astonishing how determined we often are to annoy ourselves about things with which we have nothing to do. “No doubt it would be a most excellent arrangement,” she said to herself with a smile, which she felt must be very much like a sneer. In England people would be very much surprised; but Latour was not England, and probably Monsieur Charles had learned different fashions in India, which was not England either. She wondered what sort of person he could be, impatiently disengaging from her mind the shadow that would thrust itself forward of the Monsieur Charles who had been in India, and who had also been in Sainte-Barbe. Whoever it might be, it could certainly not be he. And yet how he would thrust himself into her imagination, poke himself forward, with his light hair and sun-burned countenance! She wondered--if it should happen to be he after all--would Thérèse like him? and what would he think, to find her, Helen, established there? and would he look in the same way and speak in the same way as he had done at the Lion d’Or? “In what way?” she said to herself sternly, and herself replied, “Oh, in no way at all!” with an impatient fling of the head. It was lucky that her companions chattered all the way, for Helen made no addition to the conversation. And it was not a very long way. The _château_ had no lengthened avenue, no seclusion of lawns and trees between it and the village, but stood close to the road with patriarchal bareness and simplicity. It was a moonlight night, and the softening of spring was in the air. There was a little commotion, too, unusual to it, in Latour. The young men of the village were about in groups, the _cabarets_ were more full than was usual, except on Sundays. Helen recalled to herself with a little effort a thing which in her preoccupation she had forgotten. The next day was the day on which the lots were to be drawn for the conscription. Poor little Blanchette’s heart was full of trembling, and there was many an ache of anxiety in the village. With all her homely neighbours in such suspense, to think that she should be able to make herself almost unhappy about this Monsieur Charles from beyond the sea! CHAPTER XI.