‘This is unbearable,’ cried Albinia. ‘I shall give notice that I am always engaged in the morning.’ She desired each young lady to work a sum in her absence, and left them to murmur, if they were so disposed. Perhaps it was Lucy’s speech that made her inflict the employment; at any rate, her spirit was not as serene as she could have desired. Mr. Kendal was quite willing that she should henceforth shut her door against company in the morning; that is to say, he bowed his head assentingly. She was begging him to take a walk with her, when, at another sound of the bell, he made a precipitate retreat into his study. The visitors were the Belmarche family. The old lady was dark and withered, small, yet in look and air, with a certain nobility and grandeur that carried Albinia back in a moment to the days of hoops and trains, of powder and high-heeled shoes, and made her feel that the sweeping courtesy had come straight from the days of Marie Antoinette, and that it was an honour and distinction conferred by a superior--superior, indeed, in all the dignity of age, suffering, and constancy. Albinia blushed, and took her hand with respect very unlike the patronizing airs of Bayford Bridge towards ‘poor old Madame Belmarche,’ and with downcast eyes, and pretty embarrassment, heard the stately compliments of the ancien regime. Miss Belmarche was not such a fine specimen of Sevres porcelain as her mother. She was a brown, dried, small woman, having lost, or never possessed, her country’s taste in dress, and with a rusty bonnet over the tight, frizzly curls of her front, too thin and too scantily robed to have any waist, and speaking English too well for the piquant grace of her mother’s speech. Poor lady! born an exile, she had toiled, and struggled for a whole lifetime to support her mother; but though care had worn her down, there was still vivacity in her quick little black eyes, and though her teeth were of a dreadful colour, her laugh was so full of life and sweetness, that Albinia felt drawn towards her in a moment. Silent and demure, plainly dressed in an old dark merino, and a white-ribboned faded bonnet, sat a little figure almost behind her grandmother. Her face had the French want of complexion, but the eyes were of the deepest, most lustrous hue of grey, almost as dark as the pupils, and with the softness of long dark eyelashes--beautiful eyes, full of light and expression--and as she moved towards the table, there was a finish and delicacy about the whole form and movements, that made her a most pleasing object. But Albinia could not improve her acquaintance, for in flowed another party of visitors, and Madame curtsied herself out again, Albinia volunteering that she would soon come to see her, and being answered, ‘You will do me too much honour.’ Another afternoon devoured by visitors! Every one seemed to have come except the persons who would have been most welcome, Mr. Dusautoy, and Winifred’s friends, the Nugents.