ng the
slow parade, and sheer deference to his betters, as to the signification
of a holiday on arrested legs. Dudley Sowerby's attention to him, in
elucidating the scenes with historical scraps, greatly pleased her. The
Rev. Septimus of course occupied her chiefly.

Mademoiselle was always near, to receive his repeated expressions of
gratitude for the route she had counselled. Without personal objections
to a well-meaning orderly man, whose pardonable error it was to be
aiming too considerably higher than his head, she did but show him the
voluble muteness of a Frenchwoman's closed lips; not a smile at all, and
certainly no sign of hostility; when bowing to his reiterated compliment
in the sentence of French. Mr. Barmby had noticed (and a strong
sentiment rendered him observant, unwontedly) a similar alert immobility
of her lips, indicating foreign notions of this kind or that, in
England: an all but imperceptible shortening or loss of corners at the
mouth, upon mention of marriages of his clergy: particularly once, at
his reading of a lengthy report in a newspaper of a Wedding Ceremony
involving his favourite Bishop for bridegroom: a report to make one glow
like Hymen rollicking the Torch after draining the bumper to the flying
slipper. He remembered the look, and how it seemed to intensify on the
slumbering features, at a statement, that his Bishop was a widower,
entering into nuptials in his fifty-fourth year. Why not? But we ask it
of Heaven and Man, why not? Mademoiselle was pleasant: she was young or
youngish; her own clergy were celibates, and--no, he could not argue
the matter with a young or youngish person of her sex. Could it be a
reasonable woman--a woman!--who, disapproved the holy nuptials of the
pastors of the flocks? But we are forbidden to imagine the conducting of
an argument thereon with a lady.

Luther... but we are not in Luther's time:--Nature... no, nor can there
possibly be allusions to Nature. Mr. Barmby wondered at Protestant
parents taking a Papistical governess for their young flower of English
womanhood. However, she venerated St. Louis; he cordially also; there
they met; and he admitted, that she had, for a Frenchwoman, a handsome
face, and besides an agreeably artificial ingenuousness in the looks
which could be so politely dubious as to appear only dubiously adverse.

The spell upon Nesta was not blown away on English ground; and when her
father and mother were comparing their impressi