After a little time Desirée came to Melmar. She had been placed in charge of Mrs. Payne by an English lady, who had brought her from her home in France with the intention of making a nursery governess of the little girl, but who, finding her either insufficiently trained or not tractable enough, had transferred her, with the consent of her mother, to the Edinburgh boarding-school as half pupil, half teacher. When Melmar’s proposal came, Desirée, still indignant at her present ruler, accepted it eagerly, declared herself quite competent to act independently, and would not hear of anybody being consulted upon the matter. She herself, the little heroine said, with some state, would inform her mother, and she made her journey accordingly half in spite of Mrs. Payne, who, however, was by no means ill pleased to transfer so difficult a charge into other hands. Desirée arrived alone on an August afternoon, by the coach, in Kirkbride. The homely little Scotch village, so unlike any thing she had seen before, yet so pretty, dwelling on the banks of its little brown stream, pleased the girl’s fanciful imagination mightily. Two or three people--among them the servant from Melmar who had come to meet her--stood indolently in the sultry sunshine about the Norlaw Arms. In the shadow of the corner, bowed Jaacob’s weird figure toiled in the glow of the smithy. One or two women were at the door of the cottage which contained the widow’s mangle, and the opposite bank lay fair beneath the light, with that white gable of the manse beaming down among its trees like a smile. The wayward, excitable little Frenchwoman had a tender little heart beneath all her vivacity and caprices. Somehow her eyes sought instinctively that white house on the brae, and instinctively the little girl thought of her mother and sister. Ah, yes, this surely, and not Edinburgh, was her mother’s country! She had never seen it before, yet it seemed familiar to her; they could be at home here. And thoughts of acquiring that same white house, and bringing her mother to it in triumph, entered the wild little imagination. Women make fortunes in France now and then; she did not know any better, and she was a child. She vowed to herself to buy the white house on the brae and bring mamma there. Melmar pleased Desirée, but not so much; she thought it a great deal too square and like a prison; and Patricia did not please her at all, as she was not very slow to intimate. “Mademoiselle does not love me, Joanna,” she said to her pupil as they wandered about the banks of Tyne together, “to see every thing,” as Joanna said before they began their lessons; “and I never can love any one who does not love me.” “Patricia does not love anybody,” cried Joanna, “unless maybe herself, and not herself either--right; but never mind, Desirée, _I_ love you, and by-and-by so will Aunt Jean; and oh! if Oswald would only come home!”