Possessing a small, very small, income of her own, she added to it by coloring miniatures for the photographers. She had relatives still living in France; but she had long since ceased to correspond with them. "Ask me nothing more about my family,"she used to say. "I am as good as dead in my own country and among my own people."This was all--literally all--that she told me of herself. I have never discovered more of her sad story from that day to this.
She never mentioned her family name--never even told me what part of France she came from or how long she had lived in England.
That she was by birth and breeding a lady, I could entertain no doubt; her manners, her accomplishments, her ways of thinking and speaking, all proved it. Looking below the surface, her character showed itself in aspects not common among young women in these days. In her quiet way she was an incurable fatalist, and a firm believer in the ghostly reality of apparitions from the dead.
