is nothing to it."

There was a man gathering peaches from the sunny wall of a garden-house
by the river. Janey finished her tale, and remarked that here fruit
could be bought. Bessie, rich in the possession of a pocketful of money,
was most truly glad to hear it, and a great feast of fruit ensued, with
accompaniments of _galette_ and new milk. Then the walk was continued in
a circuit which brought them back to the school through the town. The
return was followed by a collation of thick bread and butter and thin
tea; then by a little reading aloud in Miss Foster's holiday apartment,
and then by the _dortoir_, and another good talk in the moonlight until
sleep overwhelmed the talkers. Bessie dropt off with the thought in her
mind that her father and dear Harry Musgrave must be just about going on
board the vessel at Havre that was to carry them to Hampton, and that
when she woke up in the morning they would be on English soil once more,
and riding home to Beechhurst through the dewy glades of the Forest....

This account of twenty-four hours will stand for the whole of that first
week of Bessie's exile. Only the walks of an afternoon were varied. In
company with dull, neuralgic Miss Foster the two pupils visited the
famous stone-quarries above the town, out of which so many grand
churches have been built; they compassed the shaded Cours; they
investigated the museum, and Bessie was introduced to the pretty
portrait of Charlotte Corday, in a simple cross-over white gown, a blue
sash and mob-cap. Afterward she was made acquainted with a lady of
royalist partialities, whose mother had actually known the heroine, and
had lived through the terrible days of the Terror. Her tradition was
that the portrait of Charlotte was imaginary, and, as to her beauty,
delusive, and that the tragical young lady's moving passion was a
passion for notoriety. Bessie wondered and doubted, and began to think