which she wished to send from Bordeaux, announcing her arrival; but her French was faulty, and she found the task of writing them extreme, and the result far from her personal satisfaction. So--your great-great-grandmother, being a person of education and the nicest sort of French, helped her.

“One noon, Madam Jumel waited for her at the entrance to the dining-saloon, and as your relative approached said: ‘Pardon, madam, but I heard you conversing in the most elegant and genteel French (I could not help but overhear it), and I wondered whether you would be so good as to offer me your assistance. My letters to royalty’--and history says she waved a hand most airily--‘are things that must be just so, as you can understand. . . . I am proud that crowned heads bow to me, but laws, my dear, it is a pest!’

“And the long and the short of it is that she was helped, and by your great-great-grandmother, Natalie. . . . After the letters had been corrected and little niceties were added, Madam Jumel expressed deep gratitude. . . . ‘Thank you a million times, dear friend,’ she said, in very quaintly broken French. And then, taking this bracelet from her arm, added: ‘No doubt one day, when I am dead (but not forgotten), the bracelet which I retain, the companion to this, will be displayed. . . . They will say it belonged to the widow of Burr (my dear, he was a wretch!), but this one, which I give you, and you must accept (I will have no noes!) your descendants will display as having belonged to your friend--a friend who was helped by a friend. Let me clasp it, please. Ah, there we are, and well it looks upon your arm, although it has not the round fairness of mine.’ And--that is the story.”

mine

I looked down at the bracelet.

“Did my mother wear it?” I asked.

Mrs. Crane’s face changed curiously, and then she said she had--but not often.

“But she did?” I questioned further. “Really did?”

“Yes, dear,” she responded.

“There’s a picture in the Jumel mansion,” she went on, after a few moments, “which you will doubtless see. It shows Madam Jumel wearing the companion to this bracelet. The painting was done in Rome, the last time she went abroad, which was the time your great-great-grandmamma met her. In it she is sitting between her niece and nephew--the nephew who afterward, angered at her, threw an ink-well at his aunt’s face in the painting, 

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