'that was when you took me in your arms and kissed
me, and said you would follow Madame la Comtesse to the end of the
world.'

The old nurse laughed heartily, but Victorine cried out, 'Does
Mademoiselle think I am going to follow naughty little girls who invent
follies? It is still free to me to change my mind. Poor Simon Claquette
is gnawing his heart out, and he is to be left _concierge_!'

The clock at the palace chimed eleven, Estelle took her brother's hand,
Honor rose with little Jacques in her arms, Victorine paced beside her,
and Lanty as La Jeunesse followed, puffing out his breast, and wielding
his cane, as they all went home to _dejeuner_.

Twenty-nine years before the opening of this narrative, just after the
battle of Boyne Water had ruined the hopes of the Stewarts in Ireland,
Sir Ulick Burke had attended James II. in his flight from Waterford; and
his wife had followed him, attended by her two faithful servants, Patrick
Callaghan, and his wife Honor, carrying her mistress's child on her
bosom, and her own on her back.

Sir Ulick, or Le Chevalier Bourke, as the French called him, had no
scruple in taking service in the armies of Louis XIV. Callaghan followed
him everywhere, while Honor remained a devoted attendant on her lady,
doubly bound to her by exile and sorrow.

Little Ulick Burke's foster-sister died, perhaps because she had always
been made second to him through all the hardships and exposure of the
journey. Other babes of both lady and nurse had succumbed to the
mortality which beset the children of that generation, and the only
survivors besides the eldest Burke and one daughter were the two youngest
of each mother, and they had arrived so nearly at the same time that
Honor Callaghan could again be foster-mother to Phelim Burke, a sickly
child, reared with great difficulty.

The family were becoming almost French. Sir Ulick was an intimate friend
of one of the noblest men of the day, James Fitz-James, Marshal Duke of
Berwick, who united military talent, almost equal to that of his uncle of
Marlborough, to an unswerving honour and integrity very rare in those
evil times. Under him, Sir Ulick fought in the campaigns that finally
established the House of Bourbon upon the throne of Spain, and the
younger Ulick or Ulysse, as his name had been classicalised and
Frenchified, was making his first campaign as a mere boy at the time of
the battle of Almanza, that solitary British defeat, for wh