Winding round the churchyard, Mary Anne stood a moment and looked over the dwarf quickset hedge, on that side not much higher than her knee. My lady observed that her hands were clasped for a moment, that her lips moved.
"What are you doing, Mary Anne?"
"I never like to go by mamma's grave without staying a moment to look at it, and to say a word or two of prayer," was the simple answer.
My lady laughed, not kindly. "That comes of having a Roman Catholic governess."
"Does it!" answered the girl quietly, indignant at the laugh. "Mademoiselle happens to be a Protestant. I did not learn it from her, or from any one; it comes from my heart."
Turning abruptly on to the heath, Mary Anne saw Mademoiselle Derode coming towards them, and sprung off to meet her with a glad step.
Disappointment was in store for my lady's private dream of keeping Miss Derode as governess. Mademoiselle was then on her way to the Red Court to tell them she was leaving for France in two days.
"You cannot go," said Mary Anne, with the decisively authoritative manner peculiar to the Thornycrofts. "You must come and spend some weeks with me at the Red Court."
Mademoiselle shook her little brown head. It was not possible, she said; happy as she could be at the Red Court; much as she would have liked to stay again with her dear Miss Mary Anne. Her mother wanted her, and she must go.
Turning about and about, they paced the heath while she repeated the substance of her mother's letter. Madame, said she, was suffering from a cold, from the separation, from loneliness, and had written for her. The Champs Elysées had no charms without her dear daughter; the toilettes were miserable; the playing children hustled her, their bonnes were not polite. Virginie must return the very first hour it would be convenient to do so. The pot-au-feu got burnt, the appartement smoked; madame had been so long en pension that she had forgotten how to manage things; never clever at household affairs, the craft of her hand appeared to have gone from her utterly. She had not had a dinner, so to say, since Virginie left; she had not slept one whole night. While Monsieur and Madame--her pupil's parents--had been away on their wedding tour, she had said nothing of this, but now that they were home again she would no longer keep silence. Virginie must come; and her best prayers would be upon her on the journey.