orry
at her new comrade's suspicion. Janey was quick to see it. "Oh, I have
vexed you about Elise?" cried she in a voice of pleading distress. "When
shall I learn to trust anybody again?"

Bessie smiled superior. "Very soon, I hope," said she. "You must not
afflict yourself with fancies. I am not vexed; I am only sorry if you
won't trust me. Let us wait and see. I feel a kindness for most people,
and don't need to love one less because I love another more. I promise
to keep a warm place in my heart for you always, you little mite! I have
even taken to Miss Foster because I pity her. She looks so overworked,
and jaded, and poor."

"It is easy to like Miss Foster when you know her. She keeps her mamma,
and her salary is only twenty-five pounds a year."

The dinner, to which the girls adjourned at a second summons of the
bell, was as little appetizing as the breakfast had been. There was the
nauseous soup, a morsel of veal, a salad dressed with rank oil, a mess
of sweet curd, and a dish of stewed prunes. After the fiction of dining,
Miss Foster took the two pupils for a walk by the river, where groups of
soldiers under shade of the trees were practising the fife and the drum.
Caen seemed to be full of soldiers, marching and drilling for ever.
Louise, the handsome portress at the school, frankly avowed that she did
not know what the young women of her generation would do for husbands;
the conscription carried away all the finest young men. Janey loved to
watch the soldiers; she loved all manner of shows, and also to tell of
them. She asked Bessie if she would like to hear about the emperor's
_fete_ last month; and when Bessie acquiesced, she began in a discursive
narrative style by which a story can be stretched to almost any length:

"There was a military mass at St. Etienne's in the morning. I had only
just left father, but Mademoiselle Adelaide took me with her, and a
priest sent us up into the triforium--you understand what the triforium
is? a gallery in the apse looking down on the choir. The triforium at
St. Etienne's is wide enough to drive a coach and four round; at the
Augustines, where we went once to see three sisters take the white veil,
it is quite narrow, and without anything to prevent you falling over--a
dizzy place. But I am forgetting the _fete_.... It was _so_ beautiful
when the doors were thrown open, and the soldiers and flags came
tramping in with the sunshine, and filled the nave! The generals sat