Before the Frenchwoman had been in the house twenty-four hours, she had learned exactly the relations of its inmates, and as much as has been already set forth in these pages of their family history. She had probed the characters of the husband and the wife, had listened to the mother's eulogies of her saintly son, and had sighed and shaken her head in seeming condolence over the vividly-described shortcomings of Mr. Calverley. Without effusion, and with only the dumb sympathy conveyed by her eloquent eyes and gestures, Pauline managed to lead her new-found friend, now that she comprehended her domestic troubles, and would do her best to aid her in getting rid of them, and in many other ways she made herself useful and agreeable to the cold, friendless woman who was her hostess. She re-arranged the furniture of the dreary drawing-room, lighting it up here and there with such flowers as were procurable, and with evergreens, which she bought herself; she covered the square formal chairs and couches with muslin antimacassars, and gave the room, what it had never hitherto had, the semblance of a woman's presence. She accomplished what everybody had imagined to be an impossibility, an alteration in the style of Mrs. Calverley's costume; she made with her own hands a little elegant cap with soft blond falling from it, which took away from that rigid outline of the chin; and instead of the wisp of black net round her throat, she induced Mrs. Calverley to wear a neat white muslin handkerchief across her chest. The piano, seldom touched, save when Mrs. Calverley, in an extraordinary good temper, would, for her husband's edification, thump and strum away at an overture in _Semiramide_ and other set pieces, which she had learned in her youth, was now regularly brought into use, and in the evening Pauline would seat herself at it, playing long selections from Mendelssohn and Beethoven, or singing religious songs by Mozart, the listening to which made John Calverley supremely happy, and even brought something like moisture into his wife's steely eyes. It is probable that had Mrs. Calverley had any notion that these songs were the composition of a Roman Catholic, and were many of them used in what she was accustomed to speak of as "Popish ceremonies," she would never have been induced even to listen to them; but with unerring judgment Pauline had at once divined this phase in her employer's character, and, while the particular sect to which she belonged was of no importance to herself, had taken care to make Mrs. Calverley understand that Luther had no more devoted adherent.