Now that his need of her was so great, greater than it had ever been before, she would take good care that no piety of hers should ever drive him away from her again; she felt almost penitent and apologetic for having done what she had known to be right--the woman in her had at last outgrown the nun. She almost began to doubt whether she had not been led to selfishly overrate the paramount importance of the exclusive salvation of her own particular soul! And then his frank, fresh look and manner, and honest boyish voice, so unmistakably sincere, and that mild and magnificent eye, so bright and humorous still, "so like--so like!" which couldn't even see her loving, anxious face.... Thank Heaven, there was still one eye left that she could appeal to with both her own! And what a child he had been, poor dear--the very pearl of the Rohans! What Rohan of them all was ever a patch on this poor bastard of Antoinette Josselin's, either for beauty, pluck, or mother-wit--or even for honor, if it came to that? Why, a quixotic scruple of honor had ruined him, and she was Rohan enough to understand what the temptation had been the other way: she had seen the beautiful bad lady! And, pure as her own life had been, she was no puritan, but of a church well versed in the deepest knowledge of our poor weak frail humanity; she has told me all about it, and I listened between the words. So during the remainder of her stay at Blankenberghe he was very much with Lady Caroline, and rediscovered what a pleasant and lively companion she could be--especially at meals (she was fond of good food of a plain and wholesome kind, and took good care to get it). She had her little narrownesses, to be sure, and was not hail-fellow-well-met with everybody, like him; and did not think very much of giddy little viscountesses with straddling loud-voiced Flemish husbands, nor of familiar facetious commercial millionaires, of whom Barty numbered two or three among his adorers; nor even of the "highly born" Irish wives of Belgian generals and all that. Madame de Clèves was an O'Brien. These were old ingrained Rohan prejudices, and she was too old herself to alter. But she loved the good fishermen whose picturesque boats made such a charming group on the sands at sunset, and also their wives and children; and here she and her nephew were "bien d'accord." I fear her ladyship would not have appreciated very keenly the rising splendor of a certain not altogether unimportant modern house in Barge Yard, Bucklersbury--and here she would have been wrong. The Time has come when we throw the handkerchief at female Rohans, we Maurices and our like. I have not done so myself, it is true; but not from any rooted antipathy to any daughter of a hundred earls--nor yet from any particular diffidence on my own part.