At home, however, I found all comfortable enough, and fires alight in the hall and principal rooms.
It was late in the day that I came upon Lucille alone in the drawing-room. She was looking out of the window across the bleak table-land to the sea.
"I am sorry, Mademoiselle," I said, suddenly conscious of the stiff bareness of my ancestral home, "that things are not brighter. I have done my best."
"Thank you," she said, and there was still resentment in her voice. "You have been very kind."
She stood for a few moments in silence, and then turning flashed an angry glance at me.
"I do not know who constituted you our protector," she said scornfully.
"Il y a donc des malheurs tellement bien cachés que ceux qui en sont la cause, ne les devinent même pas."
The first to show kindness to the ladies exiled at Hopton was Isabella Gayerson, who, in response to a letter from the rightful owner of the old manor house, called on Madame de Clericy. Isabella's pale face, her thin-lipped, determined mouth and reserved glance seem to have made no very favourable impression on Madame, who indeed wrote of her as a disappointed woman, nursing some sorrow or grievance in her heart.
With Lucille, however, Isabella speedily inaugurated a friendship, to which Lucille's knowledge of English no doubt contributed largely, for Isabella knew but little French.
"Lucille," wrote Madame to me, for I had returned to London in order to organise a more active pursuit of Charles Miste, "Lucille admires your friend Miss Gayerson immensely, and says that the English _demoiselles_ suggest to her a fine and delicate porcelain--but it seems to me," Madame added, "that the grain is a hard one."
So rapid was the progress of this friendship that the two girls often met either at Hopton or at Little Corton, two miles away, where Isabella, now left an orphan, lived with an elderly aunt for her companion.
Girls, it would appear, possess a thousand topics of common interest, a hundred small matters of mutual confidence, which conduce to a greater intimacy than men and boys ever achieve. In a few weeks Lucille and Isabella were at Christian names, and sworn allies, though any knowing aught of them would have inclined to the suspicion that here, at all events, the confidences were not mutual, for Isabella Gayerson was a woman in a thousand in her power of keeping a discreet counsel. I, who have been intimate with her since childhood, can boast of no great knowledge to this day of her inward hopes, thoughts and desires.