n. What can La Grenadiere be worth, you
wonder; La Grenadiere, with its stone staircase, its beaten path and
triple terrace, its two acres of vineyard, its flowering roses about
the balustrades, its worn steps, well-head, rampant clematis, and
cosmopolitan trees? It is idle to make a bid! La Grenadiere will never
be in the market; it was brought once and sold, but that was in 1690;
and the owner parted with it for forty thousand francs, reluctant as
any Arab of the desert to relinquish a favorite horse. Since then it
has remained in the same family, its pride, its patrimonial jewel, its
Regent diamond. "While you behold, you have and hold," says the bard.
And from La Grenadiere you behold three valleys of Touraine and the
cathedral towers aloft in air like a bit of filigree work. How can one
pay for such treasures? Could one ever pay for the health recovered
there under the linden-trees?

In the spring of one of the brightest years of the Restoration, a lady
with her housekeeper and her two children (the oldest a boy thirteen
years old, the youngest apparently about eight) came to Tours to look
for a house. She saw La Grenadiere and took it. Perhaps the distance
from the town was an inducement to live there.

She made a bedroom of the drawing-room, gave the children the two rooms
above, and the housekeeper slept in a closet behind the kitchen. The
dining-room was sitting-room and drawing-room all in one for the little
family. The house was furnished very simply but tastefully; there was
nothing superfluous in it, and no trace of luxury. The walnut-wood
furniture chosen by the stranger lady was perfectly plain, and the
whole charm of the house consisted in its neatness and harmony with its
surroundings.

It was rather difficult, therefore, to say whether the strange lady
(Mme. Willemsens, as she styled herself) belonged to the upper middle or
higher classes, or to an equivocal, unclassified feminine species. Her
plain dress gave rise to the most contradictory suppositions, but her
manners might be held to confirm those favorable to her. She had not
lived at Saint-Cyr, moreover, for very long before her reserve excited
the curiosity of idle people, who always, and especially in the country,
watch anybody or anything that promises to bring some interest into
their narrow lives.

Mme. Willemsens was rather tall; she was thin and slender, but
delicately shaped. She had pretty feet, more remarkable for the grace
of her i