flowering in olive-wood tubs, and making sweet lanes and hedges across
tiled courts to the pleasant gloom of the old houses.

Canon Fournier's house was in the neighborhood of the cathedral, and as
secluded, green, and garlanded as any. Oftentimes in the day his man
Launcelot watered the court-yard in agreeable zigzags. Bessie Fairfax,
when she heard the cool tinkle of the shower upon the stones, always
looked out to share the refreshment. The canon's _salon_ was a double
room with a _portière_ between. Two windows _gave_ upon the court and
two upon a shaded, paved terrace, from which a broad flight of steps
descended to the garden. The domain of the canon's housekeeper was at
one end of this terrace, and there old Babette sat in the cool shelling
peas, shredding beans, and issuing orders to Margot in the sultry
atmosphere of the kitchen stove. Bessie, alone in the _salon_ one August
morning, heard the shrill monotone of her voice in the pauses of a
day-dream. She had dropped her book because, try as she would to hold
her attention to the story, her thoughts lost themselves continually,
and were found again at every turning of the page astray somewhere about
the Forest--about home.

"It is very strange! I cannot help thinking of them. I wonder whether
anything is happening?" she said, and yielded to the subtle influence.
She began to walk to and fro the _salon_. She went over in her mind many
scenes; she recollected incidents so trivial that they had been long ago
forgotten--how Willie had broken the wooden leg of little Polly's new
Dutch doll (for surgical practice), and how Polly had raised the whole
house with her lamentations. And then she fell to reckoning how old the
boys would be now and how big, until suddenly she caught herself
laughing through tears at that cruel pang of her own when, after
submitting to be the victim of Harry Musgrave's electrical experiments,