She wondered slightly why Ted had not written to her at once, but after the vacillation he had already shown she was not unprepared for a further delay; it was more than likely that he found the complexities of writing what he could not speak to be greater than he supposed, and it amused her to conjecture that he would probably end in coming to her for the help he had learnt to expect from her in all the crises of his life. Meanwhile, there was a whole lifetime before them in which they could work out the effects of their action, and in her present mood she saw no satisfactory reason for hurrying it; she did not realise how persistently she was recalling every instance of Ted's kindness to her, as if to strengthen her resolution, and she was unconscious of the doggedness with which she avoided dwelling on a certain episode in the London visit which she had never even mentioned to her father. She had cheated herself, by degrees, into a complacency that she mistook for resignation. At last, by the mid-day post on Saturday morning, she received her letter. It came with another one, written in a hand that brought association without distinct recollection to her mind; and she opened the latter first, principally because it was the one that interested her least. The first page revealed its identity; it was from Mrs. Downing, and was characteristically full of underlined words and barely legible interpolations, and she was obliged to read it through twice before she was able to grasp its meaning. The drift of it was that the enterprising lady principal was about to open a branch of her school in Paris, where everything was to be French, "_quite_ French, you know, my dear Miss Austen,--staff, conversation, cooking, games, _everything_; a place to which I can send on the dear children from here when they want finishing. The French are such _delicious_ people, are they not? _So_ unique, and _so_ French!" The morals, however, were to be English; so, in spite of the unique French element in the French character, there was to be an English head to the establishment, and it was this position that she proceeded in a maze of extravagant compliments to offer to her former junior mistress. "Not a duenna, of _course_, for that will be supplied in the person of the excellent Miss Smithson, who will act nominally as housekeeper, and make an _exquisite_ background to the whole. There are always some of those dear foolish mammas who will insist on placing propriety before education,--so benighted, is it not? But Miss Smithson was intended by Nature, I am sure, to propitiate that kind of mamma; while _you_, my dear Miss Austen, I intend to be something more than a background. I look to you to give a _tone_ to the school, to manage the working of it all,--the amusements, the lectures, indeed, the whole _régime_; to be responsible for the dear children's happiness, and to see that they write happy letters home every week,--to take _my_ place, in fact. I