She was tall, masculine, a little ghastly perhaps, and draped in purple silk, with a lace cap, and great bands of black hair, too thick and black, perhaps, to correspond quite naturally with her bleached and sallow skin, her hollow jaws, and the fine but grim wrinkles traced about her brows and eyelids.
She smiled, she nodded, and then for a good while she scanned me in silence with a steady cunning eye, and a stern smile.
'And how is she named--what is Mademoiselle's name ?' said the tall stranger.
'_Maud_, Madame.' 'Maud!--what pretty name! Eh bien! I am very sure my dear Maud she will be very good little girl--is not so ?--and I am sure I shall love you vary moche.

And what 'av you been learning, Maud, my dear cheaile--music, French, German, eh ?' 'Yes, a little; and I had just begun the use of the globes when my governess went away.' I nodded towards the globes, which stood near her, as I said this.
'Oh! yes--the globes;' and she spun one of them with her great hand.

'Je vous expliquerai tout cela a fond.' Madame de la Rougierre, I found, was always quite ready to explain everything 'a fond;' but somehow her 'explications,' as she termed them, were not very intelligible, and when pressed her temper woke up; so that I preferred, after a while, accepting the expositions just as they came.
Madame was on an unusually large scale, a circumstance which made some of her traits more startling, and altogether rendered her, in her strange way, more awful in the eyes of a nervous _child,_ I may say, such as I was.

She used to look at me for a long time sometimes, with the peculiar smile I have mentioned, and a great finger upon her lip, like the Eleusinian priestess on the vase.
She would sit, too, sometimes for an hour together, looking into the fire or out of the window, plainly seeing nothing, and with an odd, fixed look of something like triumph--very nearly a smile--on her cunning face.
She was by no means a pleasant _gouvernante_ for a nervous girl of my years.

Sometimes she had accesses of a sort of hilarity which frightened me still more than her graver moods, and I will describe these by-and-by..