, 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
history a most interesting study.

For another "treat," as Janey Fricker called it, they went on the Sunday
to drink tea with Miss Foster at her mother's. Mrs. Foster was a widow
with ideas of gentility in poverty. She was a chirping, bird-like little
woman, and lived in a room as trellised as a bird-cage. The house was on
the site of the old ramparts, and the garden sloped to the _fosse_. A
magnolia blossomed in it, and delicious pears, of the sort called "Bon
chretiens," ripened on gnarled trees. This week was, in fact, a
beautiful little prelude to school life, if Bessie had but known it. But
her appreciation of its simple pleasures came later, when they were for
ever past. She remembered then, with a sort of remorse, laughing at
Janey's notion of a "treat." Everything goes by comparison. At this time
Bessie had no experience of what it is to live by inelastic rule and
rote, to be ailing and unhappy, alone in a crowd and neglected. Janey
believed in Mrs. Foster's sun-baked little garden as a veritable pattern
of Eden, but Bessie knew the Forest, she knew Fairfield, and almost
despised that mingled patch of beauty and usefulness, of sweet odors and
onions, for Mrs. Foster grew potherbs and vegetables amongst her
flowers.

Thus Bessie's first week of exile got over, and except for a sense of
being hungry now and then, she did not find herself so very miserable
after all.

CHAPTER XI.

_SCHOOL-DAYS AT CAEN._

One morning Bessie Fairfax rose to a new sensation. "To-day the classes
open, and there is an end of treats," cried Janey Fricker with a
despairing resignation. "You will soon see the day-scholars, and by
degrees the boarders will arrive. Madame was to come late last night,
and the next news will be of Miss Hiloe. Perhaps they will appear
to-morrow. Heigh-ho!"

"You are not to care for Miss Hiloe; I shall stand up for you. I have no
notion of tyrants," said Bessie in a spirited way. But her feelings were
very mixed, very far from comfortable. This morning it seemed more than
ever cruel to have sent her to school at her age, ignorant as she was of
school ways. She shuddered in anticipation of the dreadful moment when
it would be publicly revealed that she could neither play on the piano
nor speak a word of French. Her deficiencies had been c