"Hoping you will forgive my officiousness.
"Yours truly,
"DENYS MORTON."
"That is quite passable," Mr. Morton said when he had read it. "I think you will hardly give offence. I wonder if she remembers me?"
"She could hardly help doing that," and Denys nodded affectionately at his uncle. "But I shall be much happier when this letter arrives at its destination. The address is not very exact. However, we will see, and we can call again to-morrow—it would be kind, don't you think, to one of our 'kith,' so to speak, and in a foreign land?"
The uncle smiled. "It would be kind, as you say, Denys, so we will do it."
But when they called the following afternoon they were told that Miss Britton was in bed and Mademoiselle Thérèse engaged. As a matter of fact, she was in the midst of composing a letter to Mrs. Britton, for when Barbara had said as carelessly as she could, that she would stay in bed just for one day, Mademoiselle Thérèse, remembering her visitor's "remarks the previous afternoon, had taken alarm and sent for the doctor, and now thought it would be wiser to write to Mrs. Britton. Having wasted a good many sheets of paper, and murmured the letter over several times to herself, she sought her sister out.
"Listen," she said proudly, "I think I have succeeded admirably in telling Mrs. Britton the truth and yet not alarming her, at the same time showing her that by my knowledge of her language I am not unfitted to teach others."
"HONOURED MADAM,—I am permitting myself to write to you about your dear daughter, who has entwined herself much into our hearts. There are now some few days she has seemed a little indisposed, and at last we succeeded in persuading her to retire to bed, and called in the worthy and most respectable, not to say gifted, family doctor who gives us his attention in times of illness. He expressed his opinion that it was a species of low fever, what the dear young lady had contracted, out of the kindness of her good heart, in visiting in time of sickness the small sister of the bath-boy (a profession which you do not have in England)——
"That shows my knowledge of their customs, you see," the reader could not refrain from interpolating; then she continued with a flourish—
"and the daughter of a worthy blanchisseuse, who is in every respect very clean and orderly, therefore we thought to be trusted with the presence of your daughter, but whom, in the future, we will urge the advisability of leaving unvisited."
Mademoiselle paused a moment for breath, for the sentence was a long one, and she had rolled it out with enjoyment. "Of course," she said to her sister, "I have not yet visited the house of this blanchisseuse, but I inquired if it was clean, and, would not have allowed the girl to go if the report had not been favourable; but to continue—