He turned, and stared up at the front of the house; Mrs. Poidevin, for no reason at all, did so too. Door and windows were open wide. In the upper storey, the white roller-blinds were let down against the sun, and on the broad sills of the parlour windows were nosegays placed in blue china jars. A white trellis-work criss-crossed over the façade, for the support of climbing rose and purple clematis which hung out a curtain of blossom almost concealing the masonry behind. The whole place breathed of peace and beauty, and Louisa Poidevin was lapped round with that pleasant sense of well-being which it was her chief desire in life never to lose. Though poor Cousin Louis--feeble, childish, solitary--was so much to be pitied, at least in his comfortable home and his worthy Tourtels he found compensation. An instant after Tourtel had spoken, a woman passed across the wide hall. She had on a blue linen skirt, white stockings, and shoes of grey list. The strings of a large, bibbed, lilac apron drew the folds of a flowered bed-jacket about her ample waist; and her thick yellow-grey hair, worn without a cap, was arranged smoothly on either side of a narrow head. She just glanced out, and Mrs. Poidevin was on the point of calling to her, when Tourtel fell into a torrent of words about his flowers. He had so much to say on the subject of horticulture; was so anxious for her to examine the freesia bulbs lying in the tool-house, just separated from the spring plants; he denounced so fiercely the grinding policy of Brehault the middleman, who purchased his garden stuff to resell it at Covent Garden--"my good! on dem freesias I didn't make not two doubles a bunch!"--that for a long quarter of an hour all memory of her cousin was driven from Mrs. Poidevin's brain. Then a voice said at her elbow, "Mr. Rennuf is quite ready to see you, ma'am," and there stood Tourtel's wife, with pale composed face, square shoulders and hips, and feet that moved noiselessly in her list slippers. "Ah, Mrs. Tourtel, how do you do?" said the visitor; a question which in the Islands is no mere formula, but demands and obtains a detailed answer, after which the questioner's own health is politely inquired into. Not until this ceremony had been scrupulously accomplished, and the two women were on their way to the house, did Mrs. Poidevin beg to know how things were going with her "poor cousin." There lay something at variance between the ruthless, calculating spirit which looked forth from the housekeeper's cold eye, and the extreme suavity of her manner of speech.