Charles Dormer could never so much as think of consolation without the memory of Mrs. Hungerford coming back to him. Yes, if anyone could have comforted Tristram it would have been his own mother. This was her room; Dormer had it always when he stayed here, and it seemed full of her. Downstairs in the dining-room—he had glanced at it several times to-day over Tristram's head—was a picture, representing her as standing and looking down at her husband, seated at a table that bore a map of the West Indies outspread upon its crimson cloth. Curtains of a darker crimson, looped back to columns, and a vista of mixed landscape completed the ill-painted composition, which was only made beautiful by Mrs. Hungerford's expression. But, looking at that, Dormer knew why, as boy and young man, he had told her so many things.

It was impossible to think of her as anything else but a mother, and yet she had not married till she was nearly forty, and she had only had one child. To him she had always seemed the ideal of motherhood. That he should think so was no disloyalty to his own mother, to whose memory he still gave the almost awed worship of his childish days, for he saw now how that mother, despite her early marriage and her five sons, had never had just this gift which would always have been Mrs. Hungerford's, married or single. He knew that Mrs. Hungerford had understood what his own mother had been to him, as she understood everything else. Perhaps, indeed, she understood about Tristram now....

CHAPTER V

(1)

The pillaging of St. Germain l'Auxerrois, the fact that it now bore the legend "Mairie of the Fourth Arrondissement" upon its doors had, of course, no direct effect on Horatia—beyond teaching her of what the Paris mob was capable, and how exiguous were the titles to respect of the Laffitte ministry, already on its deathbed. Her places of worship lay elsewhere—the Embassy chapel in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, or that of the Reverend Lewis Way in the Avenue de Neuilly. For the Hon. and Rev. Stephen Grenville, if he wished to keep his daughter faithful to the Church of her baptism, had done a very shrewd thing when he extracted from her a promise to attend Morning Prayer every Sunday, when possible, and, if not, to read it herself. Horatia kept her promise faithfully. However bright the day, however alluring the prospect of going out with Armand, she resisted the temptation, and set forth, rather scandalised at the crowd of pleasure-seekers in the Tuileries gardens or elsewhere.

On the whole the service was pleasant to her, chiefly because it was a link with all things English, and in particular with her home. However commonplace and familiar "Dearly beloved brethren" might sound in English sunoundings, Horatia found that it had power greatly to stir her heart in a foreign land. It gave her, too, a sort of happy sadness to displace the Evangelical minister by her father, and his chapel (which had been a café) by Compton church.

Armand could not accompany Horatia to church, nor could she go with him—if he ever went there. This separation she had, of course, anticipated from the first, and it did not seem really to be of great importance. It mattered more to her that he did not care so much about the things of the past as she did—a discovery which she was gradually making, and which appeared to her all the more disconcerting because he, by his ancestors, belonged to that past in a way that she never could. But it interested him infinitely less, convinced and even fanatical Legitimist that he was.

She saw the thing clearly at last on the day that he drove her to Versailles in his smart phaeton lined with blue flower-dotted piqué, wherein, however, as a "fashionable" should, he sat upon so high a seat that it was extremely difficult to talk to him. Besides, there was the ridiculous little tiger behind, in his overcoat to the ankles, his gaiters and his shiny hat, who could, Horatia imagined, hear everything that they said. But she enjoyed the drive exceedingly, and looked forward with keen pleasure to seeing the palace. Yet, when they got there, Armand displayed small concern as to which part of the great pile had stood in the days of Louis the Just, and which had been built by the Grand Monarque, or on what balcony the King and Queen had showed themselves to the mob on that wild day in October, 1789. She could not but be disappointed, for she regarded her husband, quite justly, as the scion of a long line of devoted royalists, and she remembered how he had spoken, in England, of the Lilies. To her the deserted palace, abandoned for want of means to keep it up and shortly, it was said, to be converted into a museum, was heart-rending in its associations of fallen glory. And Armand's ancestors had been among the very people who had moved, gay and gallant, upon its wide terraces; in no point would he have disgraced the cohort himself. But it was evident that the empty basins of the royal fountains, the forlorn bosquets, roused in him no pleasurable melancholy, and that the Allée d'Apollon was merely a place where he could tell her, undisturbed, how charming she looked, and laugh at her sad face. In the end he took her away before she had seen all she desired, lest the drive back should not be accomplished without rain, "and your pretty dress be spoiled."

(2)

Horatia had reason to remember that day at Versailles, because of what occurred on the following morning.