to freight a sloop at Nantes with the articles he
had saved from the dismantled château, and send
them to her whom he still called his châtelaine
and benefactress.

Madame de Kergolay went down into Lancashire                                             and abode for a long time at Preston, much
beloved and respected by the old Catholic families
in those parts. But the race to which she herself
belonged, the Greyfaunts, she found decayed and
almost extinct. One nephew, a country gentleman
with estates mortgaged to their last rood, she
discovered. The son of that nephew was Edgar
Greyfaunt, who was born just before Waterloo.

When all was over with Napoleon, the Baronne
de Kergolay, who had been living on the interest
of the money sent her by Thomas Prudence, and
who had even managed to put by some twenty
hundred pounds of savings from her income,
returned to France. It was not long before she
heard of Thomas. The collapse of the Empire,
which had restored her to society, had ruined
him. On the profits of his army contracts he had
started a cotton manufactory. He might have
become a second Richard Lenoir, but peace came,
and Manchester, all prohibitive and protective
enactments notwithstanding, poked its nose of
smoking brick into France, and Thomas Prudence
was ruined. Madame de Kergolay hastened to
the succour of the man who had saved her from
starvation. But Thomas was old, and wanted
little. "I am sick of commerce," he said. "My
failure is a punishment for having taken contracts
under the usurper. Diantre! how the rouleaux
used to roll in, though. But that is all over now.
I am growing old and foolish. Let me come
back to you, Madame la Baronne, and be your
footman. Promote me to be your butler if you
like. I have my old livery still by me, and I will
serve you as faithfully as I did in the days when
you were the Châtelaine of Vieux Sablons."

"You shall be my friend and adviser in the
evening of my days," cried Madame de Kergolay,
clasping the old man's hand.

And so, indeed, Thomas Prudence, otherwise
Vieux Sablons, was; but he would never consent
to divest himself of his livery, or to consider
himself as anything but an attached and favoured
menial of the great house of Vieux Sablons.

In this light—the menial light—without the
attachment or the favour, the octogenarian was
regarded by the superb young gentleman now
sipping his Chambertin, and smoking his cigar.
This high and mighty prince, precisely as he
thought it the most natural thing in the world
that his grand-aunt should spoil and idolise
himself, deemed it a matter of course that Vieux
Sablons should be his very obedient, humble,
obsequious, and contemned servant. A hundred
times he had heard from his grand-aunt the story
of the old man's devotion and self-sacrifice. He
thought that a very natural thing, too. He knew
perfectly well that every sou the baroness
possessed had been given to her by the
wornout lacquey; but he treated him with calm and
disdainful insolence. "Well," he would sometimes
acknowledge, when remonstrated with
by his grand-aunt for some unusual act of
contumeliousness towards the ancient servitor,
"perhaps he had at one time rendered some sort of
service to the family. But it was ever so long
ago. Besides, it was his duty; and the romantic
kind of gratitude was only possible in virtuous
dramas at the Gymnase." I wonder what would
become of the world if acts of duty such as
Thomas Prudence had performed were only
possible in virtuous dramas at a playhouse!

One most salient characteristic of Edgar
Greyfaunt would be overlooked, if it were omitted to
mention that he entertained a profound contempt
for the people among whom he was domiciled.
He went into French society, and of the best,
because his relationship to Madame de Kergolay
opened to him dozens of doors in France, while his
English appellation would have been quite powerless
in like regard, in the country of his birth. He
spoke French fluently, because he had been
brought up at the Collége Louis-le-Graud; but no
protectionist farmer had ever a livelier dislike, and
heartier contempt, for the French than Mr. Edgar
Greyfaunt. He held the Greyfaunts of Lancashire
to be infinitely superior in point of extraction,
status, and polish, not only to the Kergolays,
but to all the Rohans, Noailles, Condés, or
Montmorencys in the Libro d'Oro of France. As,
however, it was only the allowance his grand-aunt
made him that kept him from starving, he
resigned himself to his lot, and contented
himself with abusing and sneering at the people in
whose midst he lived. "I have a turn for drawing
and painting," he would remark to such
English exquisites as he, from time to time, met
in Paris; "and so, as a gentleman must do
something in a country where there are no field sports
worth having, and the Church is impossible, and
Literature is snuffy and vulgar, and the Bar low, I
moved the old lady to place me with Delaroche,
who lets me do what I like, and makes much of
me. In France, you know, it is the custom for
artists to go into society. David, the scoundrel,
was a baron, and so was Gros; and they give Us
a plentiful share of crosses and red ribbons. A
fellow doesn't mind going in for art if he's looked
up to, and is decorated, and goes to court, and
all that kind of thing. But it wouldn't do in
England, you know. I should be obliged to go
into the army, or something of that sort, and
keep the paint-pot dark." After which profound
exposition of the proprieties, Prince Greyfaunt's
exquisite friends would opine that he had acted
very sensibly, and that so long as he remained in
that confounded hole, meaning Paris, it was just
as well to spoil canvas as to do nothing at all. But
he must never forget, they told him, what he
owed to society, and when the old lady (meaning
his grand-aunt) died, and cut up well, he would
return to his native country, live as a gentleman
should, and keep the paint-pots very dark indeed.

Prince Edgar had come to the end of his second
cigar, and of the Chambertin too; he had taken
his coffee, his petit verre, and his chasse. It was