r haunted Bessie
Fairfax with a sweet melancholy. She missed her little friend
exceedingly. She did not doubt that Janey would write, would return, and
even a year of silence and absence did not cure her of regret and
expectation. She was of a constant as well as a faithful nature, and had
a thousand kind pleas and excuses for those she loved. It was impossible
to believe that Janey had forgotten her, but Janey made no sign of
remembrance.

Time and change! Time and change! How fast they get over the ground! how
light the traces they leave behind them! At the next Christmas recess
there was a great exodus of English girls. The Miss Hiloes went, and
they had no successors. When Bessie wanted to talk of Janey and old
days, she had to betake herself to Miss Foster. There was nobody else
left who remembered Janey or her own coming to school.

As the time went on letters from Beechhurst were fewer and farther
between; letters from Brook she had none, nor any mention of Harry
Musgrave in her mother's. Her grandfather desired to wean her from early
associations, and a mixture of pride and right feeling kept the
Carnegies from whatever could be misconstrued into a wish to thwart him.
No one came to see her from the Forest after that rash escapade of Harry
Musgrave's. Her eighteenth birthday passed, and she was still kept at
school both in school-time and holidays.

Madame Fournier, the genial canon, the kind _cure_, a few English
acquaintances at Caen, a few French acquaintances at Bayeux, were very
good to her. Especially she liked her visits to the canon's house in
summer. Often, as the long vacation of her third year at Caen
approached, she caught herself musing on the probability of her recall
to England with a reluctancy full of doubts and fears. She had been so
long away that she felt half forgotten, and when madame announced that
once more she was to spend the autumn under her protection, she heard it
without remonstrance, and, for the moment, with something like relief.
But afterward, when the house was silent and the girls were all gone,
the unbidden tears rose often to her eyes, and the yearning of
home-sickness came upon her as strongly as in the early days of her
exile.

Bayeux is a _triste_ little city, and in hot weather a perfect sun-trap
between its two hills. The river runs softly hidden amongst willows, and
the dust rises in light clouds with scarce a breath of air. Yet glimpses
of cool beautiful green wi