Fanchette, who hailed from Paris, had attained her present post more through private and particular interest than through particular merit. There were reasons for this, it was understood, which it was not necessary to divulge, but of which the girl herself was fully sensible, and of which she would have been the last not to take ample advantage. There was no high-born lady of the Court who presumed, or was allowed to presume, so much on her position as Fanchette. Her very audacity and insolence of retort possessed for certain masculine minds a charm which was a perpetual source of indulgence and profit to her. The duke himself had been known to suffer her impertinences with an enjoying relish which redounded in no ways to her disadvantage. In style and temper she was a veritable Parisian _mondaine_, dapper and pretty, though her lips were a little thin and her nose a little sharp. She had no heart at all, but her emotions, easily responsive to small provocation, blinded herself and others to that defect. Fanchette one evening was “finishing” her young lady in preparation for a descent to the audience chamber--to which was coming M. du Tillot, Marquis de Felino and Secretary of State--and was taking full advantage of the licence allowed her tongue by a spoiling mistress. “It is fortunate, is it not, your Highness,” she said, with a little simper, “that somebody whom we know does not approve of rouge for ladies?” She was daintily fitting, as she spoke, a spray of natural pink rose-buds into the silken fillet which bound the girl’s unpowdered chestnut-brown hair. Isabella’s laced bodice was of the simplest, meet sheath for the flower-like neck and bosom which emerged from it. A _sacque_, like a drooped petal, fell from between her shoulder-blades; her slender hips were innocent of the grotesque abomination of hoops. So she was permitted, in that court of burlesque and man-millinery, to indulge her own humorous _naïveté_. It gave her an odd distinction, not unagreeable to papa’s pride. He would sternly repress any inclination detected in others to ape, servilely, that natural innocence; Isabelita should be the only sweet Arcadian in Parma. If she was to be Hebe in a raree show, she alone should display the delicious novelty of acting humanly, while the puppets, reversing their part, looked on and applauded. And yet, to Isabella herself, hers was no part at all, but only the most natural of instincts. “Fanchette,” she said; “your voice sounds very demure; or else I am very stupid. Was it weighted, or was it not, with some meaning I did not understand?” “Only that mademoiselle’s cheek, so sensitive to sudden changes of feeling, is its own best interpreter.” “Interpreter of what, and to whom, Fanchette?” “Ah! I have blundered,” said the maid; “and now I am full of confusion. It would be too daring in me to suggest.”