“It’s I who am forgetting such an English habit,” he protested. “But run away and make it, if you like. I am sure it will be very good.” She stood for a moment looking down at him, her fingers smoothing a little bunch of palest blue ribbons on her white dress. In spite of her youth, her brightness, the expression of her face in repose was serious and thoughtful, full of unconscious wistfulness. This, together with her placid manner, the manner of a child who has lived chiefly with old people and quiet nuns, made her beauty to Campion a peculiarly touching thing. Just then her eyes fell upon Campion’s wide-awake, lying on the seat at his side, and travelled to his uncovered head. She uttered a protesting cry: “Are you not afraid of a _coup de soleil_? See--you are not fit to be a guardian if you can be so foolish as that. It is I who have to look after you.” She took up the great grey hat and set it daintily on his head; then with a little laugh she disappeared into the house. When Campion raised his head again, his eyes were smiling, and in the light of a sudden flush which just died out of it, his face looked almost young. II This girl, so foreign in her education and traditions, so foreign in the grace of her movements, in everything except the shade of her dark blue eyes, was the child of an English father; and she was Benedict Campion’s ward. This relation, which many persons found incongruous, had befallen naturally enough. Her father had been Campion’s oldest and most familiar friend; and when Richard Heath’s romantic marriage had isolated him from so many others, from his family and from his native land, Campion’s attachment to him had, if possible, only been increased. From his heart he had approved, had prophesied nothing but good of an alliance, which certainly, while it lasted, had been an wholly ideal relation. There had seemed no cloud on the horizon--and yet less than two years had seen the end of it. The birth of the child, Marie-Ursule, had been her mother’s death; and six months later, Richard Heath, dying less from any defined malady than because he lacked any longer the necessary motive to live, was laid by the side of his wife. The helpless child remained, in the guardianship of Hortense, her mother’s sister, and elder by some ten years, who had already composed herself contentedly, as some women do, to the prospect of perpetual spinsterhood, and the care of her brother’s house--an ecclesiastic just appointed curé of Ploumariel. And here, ever since, in this quiet corner of Brittany, in the tranquil custody of the priest and his sister, Marie-Ursule had grown up.