from the sunniest valley in the hills of Chambery, where flowers and
trees and sunshine had been her life. Here, in the midst of blank and
grim stone houses, her heart travelled back to the chateau where she
lived before the storm of persecution drove her forth; and she spent her
heart and her days in making this cottage, upon the western border of St.
Heliers, a delight to the quiet eye.

The people of the island had been good to her and her dead husband during
the two short years of their married life, and had caused her to love the
land which necessity made her home. Her child was brought up after the
fashion of the better class of Jersey children, wore what they wore, ate
what they ate, lived as they lived. She spoke the country patois in the
daily life, teaching it to Guida at the same time that she taught her
pure French and good English, which she herself had learned as a child,
and cultivated later here. She had done all in her power to make Guida
Jersiaise in instinct and habit, and to beget in her a contented
disposition. There could be no future for her daughter outside this
little green oasis of exile, she thought. Not that she lacked ambition,
but in the circumstances she felt that ambition could yield but one
harvest to her child, which was marriage. She herself had married a poor
man, a master builder of ships, like Maitre Ranulph Delagarde, but she
had been very happy while he lived. Her husband had come of an ancient
Jersey family, who were in Normandy before the Conqueror was born; a man
of genius almost in his craft, but scarcely a gentleman according to the
standard of her father, the distinguished exile and now retired
watchmaker. If Guida should chance to be as fortunate as herself, she
could ask no more.

She had watched the child anxiously, for the impulses of Guida's
temperament now and then broke forth in indignation as wild as her tears