station, as her appearance on foot would be less likely to attract attention than in the pony-cart with the luggage.
So in the dewy morning, alone and unattended, with ashen cheeks and eyelids swollen by long weeping, Hilda Heathcote crept out of her brother's house, and walked across the hills, trusting to the keen breath of the autumn wind to obliterate the traces of a night of anguish before she arrived at the station.
She had written a long letter to Bothwell. This she carried with her, to post in Plymouth; and she had left letters for her brother and for the Fräulein. No one need be made uneasy at her disappearance.
CHAPTER XXIV.
AN ELOPEMENT ON NEW LINES.
Mdlle. Duprez occupied a first floor in an airy terrace of houses overlooking the Hoe. She was the kind of little woman to whom eating and drinking and fine dress are matters of very small moment, but who could not have endured to live in a shabby house or an ugly neighbourhood. All her surroundings were neat and bright and fair to look upon. She had brought over her furniture from Paris. It was the remnant of that furniture which had adorned her great-grandmother's house at Versailles, before the fiery spirits of the tiers état met in the tennis-court, and the Revolution began. There was not much of it left, but that little was of the best period in French cabinet-work, and in the most perfect taste.
Louise Duprez loved this heritage from her ancestors as if the chairs and sofa, cabinet and writing-table, had been living things. She used to sit and contemplate them sometimes, between the lights, in a dreamy mood, and think how much they might have told her about Marie Antoinette and her court, and the old days of the Oeil de Boeuf, if they could but have found a voice. The bonheur du jour, with its ormolu mounts, looked very human as the firelight shone upon it. The goats' heads seemed to wink and twinkle like human eyes, while the floral mouldings assumed the form of a broad human grin, as who should say, "Ah, I could tell you some fine farces about those ladies, if I could but speak!"
Mademoiselle's rooms were always the pink of neatness; not a book out of line on the shelves above the secrétaire, not a scrap of work or a stray pin-cushion littering the tables; newspapers, pamphlets, magazines, all in their places; while Mademoiselle herself was one of those dainty little women who never have a pin awry in their toilet.
