“Who are you, and why do you come to me?”

She stood mute. She had no face, no features. All below her brow was masked with a white cloth; but she had eyes, and they viewed me.

I felt, if not brave, yet a little desperate; and desperation will often suffice to fill the post and do the work of courage. I advanced one step. I stretched out my hand, for I meant to touch her. She seemed to recede. I drew nearer. Her recession, still silent, became swift. A mass of shrubs, full-leaved evergreens, laurel and dense yew, intervened between me and what I followed. Having passed that obstacle, I looked and saw nothing. I waited. I said, “If you have any errand to men, come back and deliver it.” Nothing spoke or reappeared.

This time there was no Dr. John to whom to have recourse; there was no one to whom I dared whisper the words, “I have again seen the nun.”

Paulina Mary sought my frequent presence in the Rue Crécy. In the old Bretton days, though she had never professed herself fond of me, my society had soon become to her a sort of unconscious necessary. I used to notice that if I withdrew to my room, she would speedily come trotting after me, and opening the door and peeping in, say, with her little peremptory accent,—

“Come down. Why do you sit here by yourself? You must come into the parlour.”

In the same spirit she urged me now,—

“Leave the Rue Fossette,” she said, “and come and live with us. Papa would give you far more than Madame Beck gives you.”

Mr. Home himself offered me a handsome sum—thrice my present salary—if I would accept the office of companion to his daughter. I declined. I think I should have declined had I been poorer than I was, and with scantier fund of resource, more stinted narrowness of future prospect. I had not that vocation. I could teach, I could give lessons; but to be either a private governess or a companion was unnatural to me. Rather than fill the former post in any great house, I would deliberately have taken a housemaid’s place, bought a strong pair of gloves, swept bedrooms and staircases, and cleaned stoves and locks, in peace and independence. Rather than be a companion, I would have made shirts and starved.

I was no bright lady’s shadow—not Miss de Bassompierre’s. Overcast enough it was my nature often to be; of a subdued habit I was; but the dimness and depression must both be voluntary—such as kept me docile at my desk, in the midst of my now well accustomed pupils in Madame Beck’s first classe; or alone, at my own bedside, in her dormitory, or in the alley and seat which were called mine in her garden. My qualifications were not convertible nor adaptable; they could not be made the foil of any gem, the adjunct of any beauty, the appendage of any greatness in Christendom. Madame Beck and I, without assimilating, understood each other well. I was not her companion, nor her children’s governess. She left me free; she tied me to nothing—not to herself, not even to her interests. Once, when she had for a fortnight been called from home by a near relation’s illness, and on her return, all anxious and full of care about her establishment, lest something in her absence should have gone wrong, finding that matters had proceeded much as usual, and that there was no evidence of glaring neglect, she made each of the teachers a present, in acknowledgment of steadiness. To my bedside she came at twelve o’clock at night, and told me she had no present for me. “I must make fidelity advantageous to the St. Pierre,” said she. “If I attempt to make it advantageous to you, there will arise misunderstanding between us—perhaps separation. One thing, however, I can do to please you—leave you alone with your liberty: c’est ce que je ferai.”

She kept her word. Every slight shackle she had ever laid on me, she, from that time, with quiet hand removed. Thus I had pleasure in voluntarily respecting her rules, gratification in devoting double time, in taking double pains with the pupils she committed to my charge.