Meanwhile she had enjoyment of her plunge into the inmost forest-well of
mediaeval imaginativeness, where youthful minds of good aspiration
through their obscurities find much akin to them.

She had an eye for little Skepsey too: unaware that these French Princes
had hurried him off to Agincourt, for another encounter with them and the
old result--poor dear gentlemen, with whom we do so wish to be friendly!
What amused her was, his evident fatigue in undergoing the slow parade,
and sheer deference to his betters, as to the signification of a holiday
on arrested legs. Dudley Sowerby's attention to him, in elucidating the
scenes with historical scraps, greatly pleased her. The Rev. Septimus of
course occupied her chiefly.

Mademoiselle was always near, to receive his repeated expressions of
gratitude for the route she had counselled. Without personal objections
to a well-meaning orderly man, whose pardonable error it was to be aiming
too considerably higher than his head, she did but show him the voluble
muteness of a Frenchwoman's closed lips; not a smile at all, and
certainly no sign of hostility; when bowing to his reiterated compliment
in the sentence of French. Mr. Barmby had noticed (and a strong
sentiment rendered him observant, unwontedly) a similar alert immobility
of her lips, indicating foreign notions of this kind or that, in England:
an all but imperceptible shortening or loss of corners at the mouth, upon
mention of marriages of his clergy: particularly once, at his reading of
a lengthy report in a newspaper of a Wedding Ceremony involving his
favourite Bishop for bridegroom: a report to make one glow like Hymen
rollicking the Torch after draining the bumper to the flying slipper.
He remembered the look, and how it seemed to intensify on the slumbering
features, at a statement, that his Bishop was a widower, entering into
nuptials in his fifty-fourth year. Why not? But we ask it of Heaven and