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But as the hour approached he grew restless, and sought the schoolroom, which overlooked the drive. The sun-blinds were down, and Holly was there with Mademoiselle Beauce, sheltered from the heat of a stifling July day, attending to their silkworms.
But she had come back to Robin Hill on her stepmother's death, and gathered the reins there into her small decided hands. Jolly was then at Harrow; Holly still learning from Mademoiselle Beauce. There had been nothing to keep Jolyon at home, and he had removed his grief and his paint-box abroad. There he had wandered, for the most part in Brittany, and at last had fetched up in Paris.
Although its soil is very fertile there are few watercourses in Beauce, none of them, moreover, being of a nature to impede the march of an army.
Whenever Holly or Jolly did anything unpleasing to her a not uncommon occurrence she would say to them: "The little Tayleurs never did that they were such well-brrred little children." Jolly hated the little Tayleurs; Holly wondered dreadfully how it was she fell so short of them. 'A thin rum little soul, old Jolyon thought her Mam'zelle Beauce.
But very often he thought: 'I must give up smoking, and coffee; I must give up rattling up to town. But he did not; there was no one in any sort of authority to notice him, and this was a priceless boon. The servants perhaps wondered, but they were, naturally, dumb. Mam'zelle Beauce was too concerned with her own digestion, and too 'wellbrrred' to make personal allusions.
Holly raised herself and looked up. He watched the two of them with a twinkle, Irene smiling, Holly beginning with grave inquiry, passing into a shy smile too, and then to something deeper. She had a sense of beauty, that child knew what was what! He enjoyed the sight of the kiss between them. "Mrs. Heron, Mam'zelle Beauce. Well, Mam'zelle good sermon?"
"La Beauce, put this on my table." And then turning to me, said, with a laugh: "Your ears should be tingling, monsieur, for the last hour or so there has been nothing but you talked of by my maids-of-honour. It seems that the cock of Orrain has not forgotten the use of his spurs." My tongue had long since forgotten such courtier tricks as it had learned.
We must turn away to the immeasurably earlier fire-split flints which the Abbé Bourgeois undaunted mortal! ventured to discover among the Miocene strata of the calcaire de Beauce. Those flints, if of human origin at all, were fashioned by some naked and still more hairy creature who might fairly claim to be considered as genuinely primitive.
As these facts were notorious in 1818, they had not been forgotten in 1832, and it was not at all unnatural that the least credulous of the Comtesse de R.'s friends should suggest that Neündorf should be shown to the Beauce prophet.
For, now that he had not much more time before him, the only part of the service connected with this world absorbed what interest in church remained to him. Mam'zelle Beauce stretched out a spidery hand clad in a black kid glove she had been in the best families and the rather sad eyes of her lean yellowish face seemed to ask: "Are you well-brrred?"
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