"It might be too late after this evening," I suggested. "The chauffeur will perhaps take steps at once to secure some other engagement; and I fear that a good man is always in great demand. I hope that your ladyship will kindly understand that it would be nothing to me, if he hadn't got into trouble for my sake."

"You can leave the coins, and call Sir Samuel, who is in his room next door," remarked Lady Turnour with dignity. "I will talk with him."

The greedy creature was delighted to have the coins without paying for them, and delighted with the excuse to do what she would have liked to do without an excuse, if obstinacy had not forbidden. I kept one coin for my own luck; I called Sir Samuel, who was sulking in his den, was dismissed with an order for her ladyship's dinner, which she would have in bed, and told to return with the menu.

A few minutes later, coming back, I met Mr. Jack Dane in the corridor.

"Have you seen Sir Samuel yet?" I inquired.

"No. He's sent for me, and I'm on my way to him now."

"He's going to ask you to stay," I said.

"I think you're mistaken there," replied the chauffeur. "The old boy himself has a strong sense of justice, and would like to make everything all right, no doubt, but his wife would give him no peace if he did."

"If he does, though, what shall you do?" I inquired anxiously.

Mr. Dane looked into space. "I think I'd better go in any case."

"Why?"

If he'd been a woman, I think he would have answered "Because," but being a man he reflected a few seconds, and said he thought it would be better for him in the end.

"Do you want to go?" I asked, drearily.

"No. But I ought to want to."

"Please stay," I begged. "Please—brother."

"Sir Samuel mayn't ask me; and you wouldn't have me crawl to him?"

"But if he does ask you."

"I'll stay," he said.

Impulsively, I held out my hand. He took it, and pressed it so hard that it hurt, then dropped it suddenly. His manner is certainly very odd sometimes. I suppose he doesn't want me to flatter myself that I am of any importance in his scheme of existence. But he needn't worry. He has shown me very plainly that he is one of those typical, unsusceptible Englishmen French writers put in their books, men with hearts whose every compartment is warranted love-tight.



CHAPTER XVII

Lady Turnour opened her heart and her wardrobe and gave me a blouse the first thing in the morning, which act of generosity was the more remarkable as morning is not her best time. I have found that it is the early maid who catches the first snub, which otherwise might fall innocuously upon a husband. The blouse was one which I had heard her ladyship say she hated; but then her idea of true charity, combined, as it should be, with economy, is always to give to the poor what you wouldn't be found dead in yourself, because it is more blessed to give than to receive badly made things. On the same principle I immediately passed the gift on to a chambermaid of the hotel, who perhaps in her turn dropped it a grade lower in the social scale, and so it may go on forever, blouse without end; but all that is apart from the point. The important part of the transaction was the token that the dead past was to bury its dead; and possibly Sir Samuel timidly offered a waistcoat or a pair of boots to the chauffeur.

Instead of lying in bed, as Lady Turnour had threatened to do for a week, she was up earlier than usual, as well as ever she had been, and not more than half as disagreeable. Although the sky looked as if it might burst into tears at any moment, and although Orange has nothing but historic remains and historic records to show, she was ready to start, almost cheerfully, at ten o'clock.

I was allowed to be of the party, laden with mackintoshes for my master and mistress; and I didn't admire the triumphal arch at Orange nearly as much as I had admired the smaller and older one at St. Remy. But Lady Turnour admired it far more, and was so nice to Sir Samuel that he thought it the arch of the world. They put their heads together over the same volume of Baedeker, which was an exquisite pleasure to the poor man, and he was so pathetic I could have cried into his footsteps, as he read (pronouncing almost everything wrong) about the building of the Arch of Tiberius. "Why, that's just like a sweet little statuette I used to have standing on a table in my drawing-room window!" exclaimed Lady Turnour, looking up at the beautiful Winged Victory. "You might think it was a copy!"

Although the histories say Orange wasn't very important in Roman days, it has taken revenge by letting everything not Roman fall into decay, except, of course, its memories of the family through which William the Silent of Holland became William of Orange. The house of the first William of Orange, the hero of song who rode back wounded from Roncesvalles to his waiting wife, is gone now, save for a wall and a buttress or two on a lonely hill of the old town; yet the arch, which was old when his chateau was begun, still towers dark yellow as tarnished Etruscan gold against the sky; and the Roman theatre is the grandest out of Italy. Lady Turnour could not see why the Comedie Francaise should produce plays there, even once a year, when they could do it so much more comfortably at any modern theatre in the provinces if they must travel; and as to the gathering of the Felibres, she didn't even know what Felibres were, nor did she care, as she was unlikely to meet any in society. She would have proposed going on somewhere else, as there was so "little to see in Orange," but that rain came sweeping down, cold from the east, when I had followed the pair a quarter of a mile from the motor. They fled into their mackintoshes as a hermit-crab flees into his borrowed shell, and I was the only one the worse for wear when we reached the car. I didn't much mind the wetting, but it was rather nice to be fussed over by a brother, and forced into a coat of his, whether I liked or not. "The quality" must have seen me in it, through the glass, but Lady Turnour ignored the sight. Altogether, everything was agreeable, and the thunder-storm of last night, in clearing, had turned us into quite a happy family party.

It rained all day, and I sat in my room before a blazing fire of olive wood which a dear old waiter, exactly like a confidential servant of a pope, bestowed upon me out of sheer Provencal good nature. As he's been in the hotel for thirty years, he is a privileged person, and can do what he likes.

Lady Turnour gave me a pile of stockings to look over, lest Satan should find some more ornamental use for my idle hands; so I asked Mr. Dane for his socks too; and pretended that I should consider it a slight upon my skill if he refused.

That was our last night at Avignon, and early in the morning I packed for Arles, where we would sleep. But on the way we stopped at Tarascon, so splendid with its memories of Du Guesclin, and the towers of King Rene's great chateau reflected in a water-mirror, that no Tartarin could be blamed if he were born with a boasting spirit. And there are other things in Tarascon for its Tartarins to be proud of, besides the noble old castle where King Rene used to spend his springs and summers when he was tired of living in state at Aix. There is the church of Saint Martha, and the beautiful Hotel de Ville, and—almost best of all for its quaintness, though far from beautiful—the great Tarasque lurking in a dark and secret lair.

We couldn't go into the chateau, but perhaps it was better to see it only from the outside, and remember it always in a crystal picture, framed with the turquoise of the sky. Besides, not going in gave us more time for Beaucaire, just across the river—Beaucaire of the Fair; Beaucaire of sweet Nicolete and her faithful lover Aucassin.

I know a song about Nicolete of the white feet and hair of yellow gold, and I sang it below my breath, sitting beside my brother Jack, as we crossed the bridge. Although I sang so softly, he heard, and turned to me for an instant. "You can sing!" he said.

"You don't like singing," I suggested.

"Only better than most things—that's all."

"Yet you didn't want me to sing the other night."

"That was because your hair was down. I couldn't stand both together."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Don't you? All the better. Never mind trying to guess. Let's think about the fair. Wouldn't you have liked to come here in the days when it was one of the greatest shows in all France?"

"I couldn't have come in a motor then."

"You're getting to be an enthusiast. You'll have to marry a millionaire with at least a forty-horse-power car."

"I happen to be running away from one now, in a sixty-horse-power car. But I don't want to think of him in this romantic country. The idea of Corn Plasters, near the garden where Nicolete's little feet tripped among the daisies by moonlight, is too appalling."

"Up on the hill are the towers of the castle where Aucassin was in prison for his love of Nicolete," said the chauffeur. "If only I can induce them to go there, and walk in the garden on the battlements! It's beautiful, full of great perfumed Provencal roses, and quantities of fleur-de-lys growing wild under pine trees and peering out of formal yew hedges. You never saw anything quite like it. Oh, I must manage the thing somehow."

"I think you could, in their present mood," said I. "They're quite properly honey-moony since the storm, which was a blessing in disguise. They'll go up, and feel romantic and young; but as for me—"

"You'll go up, and be the things they can only feel. I should like to go with you there—" he broke off, looking wistful.

"Oh, do get some one to guard the car, and come," I begged him. "You've seen it all before?"

"Yes."

"You look as if the place had sentimental memories for you."

He smiled. "There is a sentiment attaching to it. Someday I may tell you—" he stopped again. "No, I don't think I'll do that."

Suddenly the thought of the garden was spoiled for me. I imagined that, in happier days, he must have walked there with a girl he loved. Perhaps he loved her still, only misfortune had come to him, and they could not marry. In that case, I'd been misjudging him, maybe. His bluntnesses and abruptnesses and coldnesses didn't mean that the compartments were "love-tight," as I'd fancied, but that they were already full to overflowing.

He did induce the Turnours to see the garden on the old battlements, and he did find a suitable watch-dog for the car in order to be my companion. And he was less self-conscious and happier in his manner than he had been since the first day or two of our acquaintance. Also the garden, starred with spring flowers, was even more lovely than I had expected. I ought to have enjoyed every moment there; but—it is never pleasant to be with a man when you think he is wishing that you were another girl.

"Was she pretty?" I couldn't resist asking.

For an instant he looked bewildered; then he understood. "Very," he replied, smiling. "About the prettiest girl I ever saw. The description of Nicolete would fit her very well. 'The clear face, delicately fine,' and all that. But I don't let my mind dwell much on girls in these days, when I can help it, as you can well imagine."

"And when you can't help it?" I wanted to know.

"Oh, when I can't help it, I feel like a bear with a sore head, and no honey in my hollow tree."

So that is why he is so disagreeable, sometimes! He is thinking of the girl of the battlemented garden at Beaucaire. I shall try and find out all about her; but I don't know that I shall feel better satisfied when I have.



CHAPTER XVIII

The garden on the battlements at Beaucaire seemed to bring out all that's best in Lady Turnour, and she was—for her—quite radiant when we arrived at Arles. Not that it was much credit to her to be radiant, when the road had been perfect, and the car had behaved like an angel, as usual; but small favours from small natures are thankfully received; and just as it is a blight upon the spirits of the whole party when her ladyship frowns, so do we cheer up and hope for better things when she smiles.

As we were to spend the night at Arles, and arrived at the quaint, delightful Hotel du Forum before lunch, even the working classes (meaning my alleged brother and myself) could afford that pleasant, leisured feeling which is the right of those more highly placed.

The moment we arrived I knew that I was going to fall in love with Arles, and I hurried to get the unpacking done, so that I might be free to make its acquaintance. Lady Turnour, still in her garden mood, told me to do as I liked till time to dress her for dinner, but to mind and have no more accidents, as all her frocks hooked at the back.

I am getting to be quite a skilled lady's-maid now, and am not sure it ought not to be my permanent metier, though I do like to think I was born for better things, and comfort myself by remembering how mother used to say that a lady can always do everything better than a common person if she chooses to try, even menial work, because she puts her intelligence and love for daintiness into all she does. I unpacked my master's and mistress's things with the flashing speed of summer lightning and the neatness of a drill-sergeant. In a twinkling everything was in exactly the right place, and my conscience felt as if it were growing wings as I flew off to my luncheon. The whole afternoon free, and the saints only knew what nice, unexpected adventures might happen! Cousin Catherine used to say, not meaning to be complimentary, that I "attracted adventures as some people seem to attract microbes," and I could almost hear them buzzing round my head as I ran down-stairs.

There, waiting for me as if he were an incarnate adventure, was the chauffeur, who appeared to be quite excited. "You must have a peep into the dining-room," he said. "The door's open. You can look in without being noticed, and see the walls, which are painted with pictures from Mistral's works. Also there's something else of interest, but I won't tell you what it is. I want to see if you can discover it for yourself."

I peeped, and found the pictures charming. After following them with my eyes all round the green walls which they decorate effectively, my gaze lit upon a man sitting at one of the small tables. He was with two or three friends who hung upon the words which he accompanied by the most graceful, spirited, yet unconscious gestures. Old he may have been as years go, but the fire of eternal youth was in his vivid dark eyes, and his smile, which had in it the tenderness of great experience, of long years lived in sympathy and love for mankind. His head was very noble; and its shape, and the way he had of carrying it, would alone have shown that he was Someone.

"Who is that man?" I whispered to Jack Dane. "That one who is so different from all the others."

"Can't you guess?" he asked.

"Not Mistral?"

"Yes. It's one of his days here. He'll be in the museum after lunch. I'll take you there, and if he sees that you're interested in things, he'll talk to you."

"Oh, how glorious!" I breathed, quite awed at the prospect. "But if he should find out that we're only lady's-maid and chauffeur?"

"Do you think it would matter to him who we were—a great genius like that? He wouldn't care if we were beggars, if we had souls and brains and hearts."

"Well, we have got some of those things," I said. "Do let's hurry, and get to the museum before our betters. They can always be counted upon to spend an hour and a half at lunch if there's a good excuse, such as there's sure to be in this place, famous for rich Provencal cooking. Whereas Monsieur Mistral looks as if he would grudge more than half an hour on an occupation so prosaic as eating."

"Nothing could be prosaic to him," said Mr. Dane. "And that's the secret of life, isn't it? I think you have it, too, and I'm trying to take daily lessons from you. By the time we part I hope I shan't be quite such a sulky, discontented brute as I am now."

"By the time we part!" The words gave me a queer, horrid little prick, with just that nasty ache that comes when you jab a hatpin into your head instead of into your hat, and have got to pull it out again. I have grown so used to being constantly with him, and having him look after me and order me about in his dictatorial but curiously nice way, that I suppose I shall rather miss him for a week or two when this odd association of ours comes to an end.

It is strange how one ancient town can differ utterly from its neighbour, and what an extraordinary, unforgettable individuality each can have.

The whole effect of Avignon is mediaeval. In Arles your mind flies back at once to Rome, and then pushes away from Rome to find Greece. All among the red, pink, and yellow houses, huddled picturesquely together round the great arena, you see Rome in the carved columns and dark piles of brick built into mediaeval walls. The glow and colour of the shops and houses seem only to intensify the grimness and grayness of that Roman background, the immense wall of the arena. Greece you see in the eyes of the beautiful, stately women, young and old, in their classic features, and the moulding of their noble figures. (No wonder Epistemon urged his giant to let the beautiful girls of Arles alone!) You feel Greece, too, in the soft charm of the atmosphere, the dreamy blue of the sky, and the sunshine, which is not quite garish golden, not quite pale silver; a special sky and special sunshine, which seem to belong to Arles alone, enclosing the city in a dream of vanished days. The very gaiety which must have sparkled there for happy Greek youths and maidens gives a strange, fascinating sadness to it now, as if one felt the weight of Roman rule which came and dimmed the sunlight.

It was delightful to walk the streets, to look at the lovely women in their becoming head-dresses, and to stare into the windows of curiosity shops. But there was the danger of committing lese-majeste by running into the arms of the bride and groom at the museum, so "my brother" hurried me along faster than I liked, until the fascination of the museum had enthralled me; then I thanked him, for Mistral was there, for the moment all alone.

Mr. Dane hadn't told me that they had met before, but Monsieur Mistral greeted him at once as an acquaintance, smiling one of his illuminating smiles. He even remembered certain treasures of the museum which the chauffeur—in unchauffeur days—had liked best. These were pointed out and their interest explained to me, best of all to my romantic, Latin side being the "Cabelladuro d'Or," the lovely golden hair of the dead Beauty of Les Baux, that enchanted princess whose magic sleep was so rudely broken. We all talked together of the exquisite Venus of Arles, agreeing that it was wicked to have transplanted her to the Louvre; and Mistral's eyes rested upon me with something like interest for a moment as I said that I had seen and loved her there. I felt flattered and happy, forgetting that I was only a servant, who ought scarcely to have dared speak in the presence of this great genius.

"She seems to understand something of the charm of Provence, which makes our country different from any other in the world, does she not?" the poet said at last to my companion. "She would enjoy an August fete at Arles. Some day you ought to bring her."

Mr. Dane did not answer or look at me; and I was thankful for that, because I was being silly enough to blush. It was too easy so see what Monsieur Mistral thought!

"Why didn't you tell me you knew him already?" I asked, when we had reluctantly left the museum (which might be invaded by the Philistines at any minute) and were on our way to the famous Church of St. Trophime. That we meant to see first, saving the theatre for sunset.

"Oh," answered the chauffeur evasively, "I wasn't at all sure he'd remember me. He has so many admirers, and sees so many people."

"I have a sort of idea that your last visit to this part of the world was paid en prince, all the same!" I was impertinent enough to say.

He laughed. "Well, it was rather different from this one, anyhow," he admitted. "A little while ago it made me pretty sick to compare the past with the present, but I don't feel like that now."

"Why have you changed?" I asked.

"Partly the influence of your cheerful mind."

"Thank you. And the other part?"

"Another influence, even more powerful."

"I should like to know what it is, so that I might try to come under it, too, if it's beneficent," that ever-lively curiosity of mine prompted me to say.

"I am inclined to think it is not beneficent," he answered, smiling mysteriously. "Anyhow, I'm not going to tell you what it is."

"You never do tell me anything about yourself," I exclaimed crossly, "whereas I've given you my whole history, almost from the day I cut my first tooth, up to that when I—adopted my first brother."

"Or had him thrust upon you," he amended. "You see, you've nothing to reproach yourself with in your past, so you can talk of it without bitterness. I can't—yet. Only to think of some things makes me feel venomous, and though I really believe I'm improving in the sunbath of your example, which I have every day, the cure isn't complete yet. Until I am able to talk of a certain person without wanting to sprinkle my conversation with curses, I mean to be silent. But I owe it to you that I don't want to curse her any more. A short time ago it gave me actual pleasure."

So it is to a woman he owes his misfortunes! As Alice said in Wonderland, it grows "mysteriouser and mysteriouser." Also it grows more romantic, when one puts two and two together; and I have always been great at that. The "sentimental association" of the battlement garden plus the inspiration to evil language, equal (in my fancy) one fair, faithless lady, once loved, now hated. I hate her, too, whatever she did, and I should like to box her ears. I hope she's quite old, and married, and that she makes up her complexion, and everything else which causes men to tire of their first loves sooner or later. Not that it is anything to me, personally; but one owes a little loyalty to one's friends.

The porch and cloisters of St. Trophime's were too perfectly beautiful to be marred by a mood; but my brother Jack's mysteriously wicked sweetheart would keep coming in between me and the wonderful carvings in the most disturbing way. Some women never know when they are wanted! But I did my best to make Mr. Dane forget her by taking an intelligent interest in everything, especially the things he cared for most, though once, in an absent-minded instant, I did unfortunately say: "I don't admire that type of girl," when we were talking about a sculptured saint; and although he looked surprised I thought it too complicated to try and explain.

The afternoon light was burnishing the ancient stone carvings to copper when we left the cloisters of St. Trophime, took one last look at the porch, and turned toward the amphitheatre. We were right to have waited, for the vast circle was golden in the sunset, like a heavy bracelet, dropped by Atlas one day, when he stretched a weary arm; and the beautiful fragments of coloured marbles, which the Greeks loved and Christians destroyed, were the jewels of that great bracelet. The place was so pathetically beautiful in the dying day that a soft sadness pressed upon me like a hand on my forehead, and echoes of the long-dead past, when Greek Arles was a harbour of commerce by sea and river, or when it was Roman Arelate, rich and cruel, rang in my ears as we wandered through the cells of prisoners, the dens of lions, and the rooms of gladiators, where the young "men about town" used to pat their favourites on oiled backs, or make their bets on ivory tablets.

"If we were here by moonlight, we should see ghosts," I said. "Come, let us go before it grows any darker or sadder. The shadows seem to move. I think there's a lion crouching in that black corner."

"He won't hurt you, sister Una," said my brother Jack. "There's one thing you must see here before I take you home—back to the hotel, I mean; and that is the Saracen Tower, as they call it."

So we went into the Saracen Tower, and high up on the wall I saw the presentment of a hand.

"That is the Hand of Fatima," explained the guide, who had been following rather than conducting us, because the chauffeur knew almost as much about the amphitheatre as he did. "You should touch it, mademoiselle, for luck. All the young ladies like to do that here; and the young men also, for that matter."

Instantly my brother lifted me up, so that I might touch the hand; and then I would not be content unless he touched it too.

I had dinner in the couriers' room that evening, with my brother, when I had dressed Lady Turnour for hers. We were rather late, and had the room to ourselves, for the crowd which had collected there at luncheon time had vanished by train or motor. There was a nice old waiter, who was frankly interested in us, recognizing perhaps that, as a maid and chauffeur, we were out of the beaten track. He wanted to know if we had done any sight-seeing in Arles, and seemed to take it as a personal compliment that we had.

"Mademoiselle touched the Hand of Fatima, of course?" he asked, letting a trickle of sauce spill out of a sauce-boat in his friendly eagerness for my answer.

"Oh, yes, I saw to it that she did that," replied Mr. Dane, with conscious virtue in the achievement.

"It is for luck, isn't it?" I said, to make conversation.

"And more especially for love," came the unexpected answer.

"For love!" I exclaimed.

"But yes," chuckled the old man. "If a young girl puts her hand on the Hand of Fatima at Arles, that hand puts love into hers. Her fate is sealed within the month, so it is said."

"Nonsense!" remarked Mr. Dane, "I never heard that silly story before." And he went on eating his dinner with extraordinary nonchalance and an unusual, almost abnormal, appetite.



CHAPTER XIX

I shall always feel that I dreamed Aigues Mortes: that I fell asleep at night—oh, but fell very far, so much farther than one usually falls even when one wakes with the sensation of dropping from a great height, that I went bumping down, down from century to century, until I touched earth in a strange, drear land, to find I had gone back in time about seven hundred years.

Not that there is a conspicuous amount either of land or earth at Aigues Mortes, City of Dead Waters—if the place really does exist, which I begin to doubt already; but I have only to shut my eyes to call it up; and in my memory I shall often use it as a background for some mediaeval picture painted with my mind. For with my mind I can rival Raphael. It is only when I try to execute my fancies that I fail, and then they "all come different," which is heart breaking. But it will be something to have the background always ready.

The dream did not begin while we spun gaily from Arles to Aigues Mortes, through pleasant if sometimes puerile-seeming country (puerile only because we hadn't its history dropping from our fingers' ends); but there was time, between coming in sight of the huge, gray-brown towers and driving in through the fortified gateway, for me to take that great leap from the present far down into the past.

To my own surprise, I didn't want to think of the motor-car. It had brought us to older places, but within this walled quadrangle it was as if we had come full tilt into a picture; and the automobile was not an artistic touch. Ingrate that I was, I turned my back upon the Aigle, and was thankful when Sir Samuel and Lady Turnour walked out of my sight around the corner of the picture. I pretended, when they had disappeared, that I had painted them out, and that they would cease to exist unless I relented and painted them in again, as eventually I should have to do. But I had no wish to paint the driver of the car out of my picture, for in spite of his chauffeur's dress he is of a type which suits any century, any country—that clear-cut, slightly stern, aquiline type which you find alike on Roman coins and in modern drawing-rooms. He would have done very well for one of St. Louis's crusaders, waiting here at Aigues Mortes to sail for Palestine with his king, from the sole harbour the monarch could claim as his on all the Mediterranean coast. I decided to let him remain in the dream picture, therefore, and told him so, which seemed to please him, for his eyes lighted up. He always understands exactly what I mean when I say odd things. I should never have felt quite the same to him again, I think, if he had stared and asked "What dream picture?"

I had been brought on this expedition strictly for use, not for ornament. We were going from Aigues Mortes to St. Gilles and from St. Gilles to Nimes, therefore Arles was already a landmark in our past. I could walk about and amuse myself if I liked, but I must be at the inn before the return of my master and mistress to arrange a light repast collected at Arles, as we should have to lunch later at Nimes, and the resources of Aigues Mortes were not supposed to be worthy of millionaires in search of the picturesque. There were several neat packages, the contents of which would aid and abet such humble refreshment as the City of Dead Waters could produce; but I had more than an hour to play with; and much can be done in an hour by an enthusiast with a good circulation.

I had not quite realized, however, how largely my brother's companionship contributed to my pleasure on these excursions. We had seen almost everything together, and suddenly it occurred to me that I was taking his presence too much for granted. He would not go with me now, because in so small a round we were certain to run up against the Turnours, and her ladyship might be pleased to give me another lecture like that of evil memory at Avignon. I would have risked future punishment for the sake of present pleasure, and it was on my tongue to say so; but I swallowed the words with difficulty, like an over-large pill.

So it fell out that I wandered off alone, sustaining myself on high thoughts of Crusaders as I gazed up at the statue of St. Louis, and paced the sentinels' pathway round the gigantic ramparts, unchanged since Boccanegra built them. Looking down from the ramparts the town, enclosed in the fortress walls, was like a faded chessboard cast ashore from the wreck of some ancient ship; and round the dark walls and towers waves of yellow sand and wastes of dead blue waters stretched as far as my gaze could reach, toward the tideless sea.

Louis bought this tangled desert of sand and water in the middle of the thirteenth century from an Abbot of Psalmodi, so the guide told me, and I liked the name of that abbot so much that I kept saying it over and over, to myself. Abbot of Psalmodi! It was to the ear what an old, illuminated missal is to the eye, rich with crimson lake, and gold, and ultramarine. It was as if I heard an echo from King Arthur's day, that dim, mysterious day when history was flushed with dawn; the Abbot of Psalmodi!

The heart of Aigues Mortes for me was the great tower of Constance, but a very wicked heart, full of clever and murderous devices, which was at its wickedest, not in the dark ages, but in the glittering times of Louis XIV. and of other Louis after him. That tower is the bad part of the dream where horrors accumulate and you struggle to cry out, while a spell holds you silent. In the days when Aigues Mortes was not a dream, but a terrible reality to the prisoners of that cruel tower, how many anguished cries must have broken the spell; cries from hideous little dungeons like rat-holes, cries from the far heights of the tower where women and children starved and were forgotten!

I was almost glad to get away; yet now that I am away I shall often go back—in my dream.

Alexander Dumas the elder went from Aigues Mortes to St. Gilles, driving along the Beaucaire Canal, on that famous tour of his which took him also to Les Baux; and we too went from Aigues Mortes to St. Gilles, though I'm sure the Turnours had no idea that it was a pilgrimage in famous footprints. Only the humble maid and chauffeur had the joy of knowing that. We had both read Dumas' account of his journey, and we laughed over the story of the little saint he stole at Les Baux.

It was a pleasant run to St. Gilles, though there was a shrewish nip in the wind which made me hope that Lady Turnour's mind was not running ahead to the mountains and gorges in front of her, not far away by days or miles now. I wanted her to get tangled up in them before she had time to think of the cold, and then it would be too late to turn tail.

I had just begun to call the little town of St. Gilles an "ugly hole," and wonder what St. Louis saw to love in it, when, coming out of a squalid, hilly street through which I had tried to pick my way on foot, alone, suddenly the facade of the wonderful old church burst upon my sight, a vision of beauty.

No self-respecting motor-car would have condescended to trust itself in such a street, and as a rabble of small male St. Gillesites swarmed round the Aigle when she stopped at the beginning of the ascent, Mr. Dane had to play guardian angel. "I've been here before," he said, as usual, for this whole tour seems to be a twice-told tale for him. A few days ago I should have pitied him aloud for not being able to blow the dust off his old impressions; but now, when he speaks of past experiences, I think: "Oh, I wonder if this is another place associated in his mind with that horrid woman?" For on mature deliberation I have definitely niched her among the Horrors in my mental museum. In front of me walked Sir Samuel and Lady Turnour, whose very backs cried out their loathing of St. Gilles; but abruptly the expression of their shoulders changed; they had seen the facade, and even they could not help feeling vaguely that it must be unique in the world, that of its kind nothing could be more beautiful.

That was before I saw it, for a respectful distance must be maintained between Those Who Pay and Those Who Work; but I guessed from the backs that something extraordinary was about to be revealed. Then it was revealed, and I would have given a good deal to have some one to whom I could exclaim "Isn't it glorious!"

Still, I am luckily very good chums with myself, and it is never too much trouble to think out new adjectives for my own benefit, or to indicate quaint points of view. I was soon making the best of my own society in the way of intelligent companionship, shaking crumbs of half-forgotten history out of my memory, and finding a dried currant of fact here and there. In convent days there was hardly a saint or saintess with whom I hadn't a bowing acquaintance, and although a good many have cut me since, I can generally recall something about them, if necessary, as title worshippers can about the aristocracy. I thought hard for a minute, and suddenly up rolled a curtain in my mind, and there in his niche stood St. Gilles. He was born in Athens, and was a most highly connected saint, with the blood of Greek kings in his veins, all of which was eventually spilled like water in the name of religion. It seemed very suitable that such perfection of carving and proportion as was shown in steps, towers, facade, and frieze should be dedicated to a Greek saint, who must have adored and understood true beauty as few of his brother saints could.

Mr. Dane had said, just before I started, that there was a gem of a spiral staircase, called the Vis de St. Gilles, which I ought to see, and a house, unspoiled since mediaeval days; but the question of these sights was settled adversely for me by my master and mistress. The frieze they did admire, but it sufficed. Their inner man and woman clamoured for a feast, and the eyes must be sacrificed.

As for me, I did not count even as a sacrifice, of course, but I followed them back to the car as I'd followed them from it, and the car flew toward Nimes.

Just at first, for a few moments which I hate to confess to myself now, I was disappointed in Nimes. The town looked cold, and modern, and conceited after the melancholy charm of Arles and the mediaeval aspect of Avignon; but that was only as we drove to our stately hotel in its large, dignified square. Afterward—after the inevitable lunching and unpacking—when I started out once again in the society of my adopted relative, I prayed to be forgiven.

A gale was blowing, but little cared we. A toque or a picture-hat make all the difference in the world to a woman's impressions, even of Paradise—if the wind be ever more than a lovely zephyr there. Lady Turnour had insisted on changing her motoring hat for a Gainsborough confection which would, I was deadly certain, cause her to loathe Nimes while memory should last; but the better part was mine. Toqued and veiled, the mistral could crack its cheeks if it liked; it couldn't hurt mine, or do unseemly things to my hair.

In the gardens of Louis XIV. I gave myself to Nimes as devotee forever; and as the glories of the past slowly dawned upon me, that Past round which the King had planted his flowers and formal trees, and placed vases and statues, I wished I were a worthier worshipper at the shrine.

I think that there can be no more beautiful town in the world than Nimes in springtime. The wind brought fairy perfumes, and lovely little green and golden puff-balls fell from the budding trees at our feet, as if they wanted to surprise us. The fish in the crystal clear water of the old Roman baths, which King Louis tried to spoil but couldn't, swam back and forth in a golden net of sunshine. We two children of the twentieth century amused ourselves in attempting to reconstruct the baths as they must have looked in the first century; and the glimmering columns under the green water, now lost to the eye, now seen again, white and elusive as mermaids playing hide and seek, helped our imagination.

Far easier was it to go back to Rome in the Temple of Diana, so beautiful in ruin and so little changed except by time, as to bring to the heart a pang of mingled joy and pain, of sadness which women love and men resent—unless they are poets. Doves were cooing softly there, the only oracles of the temple in these days; and what they said to each other and to us seemed more mysterious than the sayings of common doves, because their ancestors had no doubt handed down much wisdom to them, from generation to generation, ever since Diana was taken seriously as a goddess, or perhaps even since the dim days when Celtic gods were reigning powers.

From the gardens we went slowly to that other temple which unthinking people and guide-books have named the Maison Carree, the most lovely temple out of Greece, and the one which has suffered most from sheer, uncompromising stupidity in modern days. Now it rests from persecution, though it shows its scars; and I wondered dully, as I stood gazing at the Corinthian columns—strong, yet graceful—how so dull a copy as the Madeleine could possibly have been evolved from such perfection.

Inside in the museum was the dearest old gentleman in a tall hat, who explained to us with ingenuous pride and dignity the splendid collection of coins which he himself had given to the town. It was easy to see that they were the immediate jewels of his soul; there was not one piece which he did not know and love as if it had been his child, though there were so many thousands that he alone could keep strict count of them. He insisted gravely upon the superlative value of the least significant in appearance, but he could joke a little about other things than coins. There was an old mosaic which we admired, with a faded God of Love riding a winged steed.

"L'Amour s'en va," he chuckled, pointing to the half-obliterated figure. "N'est pas?" and he turned to me for confirmation. "I don't know yet," I answered.

"Mademoiselle is very fortunate—but very young," said the dear old gentleman, looking like a late eighteenth-century portrait as he smiled under his high hat. "And what thinks monsieur?"

"That it is better not to give him a chance to fly away, by keeping the door shut against him in the beginning," replied Mr. Dane, as coldly as if he kept his heart on ice.

Sunset was fading, like Love on the mosaic, when we came to the amphitheatre; but the sky was still stained red, and each great arch of stone framed a separate ruby. It was a strange effect, almost sinister in its splendour, and all the air was rose-coloured.

"Is it a good omen or an evil one for our future?" I asked.

"Means storms, I think," the chauffeur answered in the laconic way he affects sometimes, but there was an odd smile in his eyes, almost like defiance—of me, or of Fate. I didn't know which but I should have liked to know.



CHAPTER XX

The wind sang me to sleep that night in Nimes—sang in my dreams, and sang me awake when morning turned a white searchlight on my eyelids.

I was glad to see sunshine, for this was the day of our flight into the north, and if the sky frowned on the enterprise Lady Turnour might frown too, in spite of Bertie and his chateau.

It was cold, and I trembled lest the word "snow" should be dropped by the bridegroom into the ear of the bride; but nothing was said of the weather or of any change in the programme, while I and paint and powder and copper tresses were doing what Nature had refused to do for her ladyship.

"Cold morning, madame!" remarked the porter, who came to bring more wood for the sitting-room fire before breakfast. He was a polite and pleasant man, but I could have boxed his ears. "Madame departs to-day in her automobile? Is it to go south or north? Because in the north—"

With great presence of mind I dropped a pile of maps and guide-books.

"What a clumsy creature you are!" exclaimed her ladyship, playing into my hands. "I couldn't understand the last part of what he said."

Luckily by this time the man was gone; and my memory of his words was extraordinarily vague. But a dozen things contrived to keep me in suspense. Every one who came near Lady Turnour had something to say about the weather. Then, for the first time, it occurred to the Aigle to play a trick upon us. Just as the luggage was piled in, after numerous little delays, she cast a shoe; in other words, burst a tyre, apparently without any reason except a mischievous desire to be aggravating. Another half hour wasted! And fat, silvery clouds were poking up their great white heads over the horizon in the north, where, perhaps, they were shaking out powder.

The next thing that happened was a snap and a tinkle in our inner workings, rather like the sound you might expect if a giantess dropped a hairpin. "Chain broken!" grumbled the chauffeur, as he stopped the car on the level of a long, straight road, and jumped nimbly down. "We oughtn't to have boasted yesterday."

"Who's superstitious now?" I taunted him, as he searched the tool-box in the same way a child ransacks a Christmas stocking.

"Oh, about motor-cars! That's a different thing," said he calmly. "Cold, isn't it? My fingers are so stiff they feel as if they were all thumbs."

"Et tu, Brute," I wailed. "For goodness' sake, don't let her hear you. She's capable even now of turning back. The invitation to the chateau hasn't come—and we're not safely in the gorges yet."

"Nor shan't be soon, if this sort of thing keeps on," remarked the chauffeur. "We shall have to lunch at Alais."

"You say that as if it was the devil's kitchen."

"There's probably first rate cooking in the devil's kitchen; I'm not so sure about the inns at Alais."

"But it's arranged to picnic on the road to-day for the first time, you know. They put up such good things at Nimes, and I was to make coffee in the tea-basket."

"That's why I wanted to get on. Picnic country doesn't begin till after Alais. Who could lunch on a dull roadside like this? Only a starving tramp wouldn't get indigestion."

It was true, and I began to detest the unknown Alais. Perhaps, after all, we might sweep through the place, I thought, without the idea of lunch occurring to the passengers. But Mr. Dane's heart-to-heart talk with the Aigle resulted in quite a lengthy argument; and no sooner did a town group itself in the distance than Sir Samuel knocked on the glass behind us.

"What place is this?" he asked.

"Alais," was the answer the chauffeur made with his lips, while his eyebrows said "I told you so!" to me.

"I think we'd better lunch here," Sir Samuel went on. And the arrival of a princely blue motor car at the nearest inn was such a shock to the nerves of the landlady and her staff that the interval before lunch was as long and solemn as the Dead March in Saul. To show what he could do in an emergency, the chef slaughtered and cooked every animal within reach for miles around.

They appeared in a procession, according to their kind, when necessary disguised in rich and succulent sauces which did credit to the creator's imagination; and there were reserve forces of cakes, preserves, and puddings, all of which coldly furnished forth the servants' meal when they had served our betters.

It was nearly three o'clock when we were ready to leave Alais, and the chauffeur had on his bronze-statue expression as he took his seat beside me after starting the car.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"Nothing," said he, "except that I don't know where we're likely to lay our heads to-night."

"Where do you want to lay them?" I inquired flippantly. "Any gorge will do for mine."

"It won't for Lady Turnour's. But it may have to, and in that case she will probably snap yours off."

"Cousin Catherine has often told me it was of no use to me, except to show my hair. But aren't there hotels in the gorge of the Tarn?"

"There are in summer, but they're not open yet, and the inns—well, if Fate casts us into one, Lady Turnour will have a fit. My idea was: a splendid run through some of the wildest and most wonderful scenery of France—little known to tourists, too—and then to get out of the Tarn region before dark. We may do it yet, but if we have any more trouble—"

He didn't finish the sentence, because, as if he had been calling for it, the trouble came. I thought that an invisible enemy had fired a revolver at us from behind a tree, but it was only a second tyre, bursting out loud, instead of in a ladylike whisper, like the other.

Down got Mr. Dane, with the air of a condemned criminal who wants every one to believe that he is delighted to be hanged. Down got I also, to relieve the car of my weight during the weird process of "jacking up," though the chauffeur assured me that I didn't matter any more than a fly on the wheel. Our birds of paradise remained in their cage, however, Lady Turnour glaring whenever she caught a glimpse of the chauffeur's head, as if he had bitten that hole in the tyre. But before us loomed mountains—disagreeable-looking mountains—more like embonpoints growing out of the earth's surface than ornamental elevations. On the tops there was something white, and I preferred having Lady Turnour glare at the chauffeur, no matter how unjustly, than that her attention should be caught by that far, silver glitter.

Suddenly my brother paused in his work, unbent his back, stood up, and regarded his thumb with as much intentness as if he were an Indian fakir pledged to look at nothing else for a stated number of years. He pinched the nail, shook his hand, and then, abandoning it as an object of interest, was about to inflate the mended tyre when I came forward.

"You've hurt yourself," I said.

"I didn't know you were looking," he replied, fixing the air-pump. "Your back seemed to be turned."

"A girl who hasn't got eyes in the back of her head is incomplete. What have you done to your hand?"

"Nothing much. Only picked up a splinter somehow. I tried to get it out and couldn't. It will do when we arrive somewhere."

"Let me try," I said.

"Nonsense! A little flower of a thing like you! Why, you'd faint at the sight of blood."

"Oh, is it bleeding?" I asked, horrified, and forgetting to hide my horror.

He laughed. "Only a drop or two. Why, you're as white as your name, child."

"That's only at the thought," I said. "I don't mind the sight, although I do think if Providence had made blood a pale green or a pretty blue it would have been less startling than bright red. However, it's too late to change that now. And if you don't show me your thumb, I'll have hysterics instantly, and perhaps be discharged by Lady Turnour on the spot."

At this awful threat, which I must have looked terribly capable of carrying out, he obeyed without a word.

A horrid little, thin slip of iron had gone deep down between the nail and the flesh, and large drops of the most sensational crimson were splashing down on to the ground.

"The idea of your driving like that!" I exclaimed fiercely. But my voice quivered. "One, two, three!" I said to myself, and then pulled. I wanted to shut my eyes, but pride forbade, so I kept them as wide open as if my lids had been propped up with matches. Out came the splinter of metal, and seeing it in my hand—so long, so sharp—things swam in rainbow colours for a few seconds; but I was outwardly calm as a Stoic, and wrapped the thumb in my handkerchief despite my brother's protests.

"Brave child," he said. "Thank you."

I looked up at him, and his eyes had such a beautiful expression that a queer tenderness began stirring in my heart, just as a young bird stirs in a nest when it wakes up. I couldn't help having the impression that he felt the same thing for me at the moment. It was as if our thoughts rushed together, and then flew away in a hurry, frightened at something they'd seen. He dashed back to his tyre pumping, and I pranced away down the road to look intently at a small white stone, as if it had been a pearl of price.

Afterward I stooped and picked it up. "You're a kind of little milestone in my life," I said to it. "I think I'd like to keep you, I hardly know why." And I slipped it into the pocket of my coat.

Every sort of work that you do on a motor-car always seems to take exactly half an hour. You may think it will be twenty minutes, but you know in your heart that it will be thirty, to the last second. The people in the glass-house lost count of time after the first, through playing some ghastly kind of double dummy bridge, and as they seemed cheerful Lady Turnour and her dummy were evidently winning. But Mr. Dane did not lose count, I was sure; and when we had started again, and got a mile or two beyond Alais, he looked somewhat sternly at the mountains which no longer appeared ill-shapen. We mounted toward them over the heads of their children the foothills, and came into a region which promised wild picturesqueness. There was an extra thrill, too, because the mountains were the Cevennes, where Robert Louis Stevenson wandered with his Modestine, and slept under the stars. Judging from the gravity of the chauffeur's face he was not sure that we, too, might not have to sleep under the stars (if any), a far less care-free company than "R.L.S." and his donkey.

Sir Samuel has now exchanged cards for a Taride map, which he often studied with no particular result beyond mental satisfaction, as he generally held it upside down and got his information by contraries. But at a straggling hillside village where two roads bifurcated he suddenly became excited. Down went the window, and out popped his head.

"You go to the left here!" he shouted, as the Aigle was winging gracefully to the right.

"I think you're mistaken, sir," replied the chauffeur, stopping while the car panted reproachfully. "I know the 'Routes de France' says left, but they told me at Alais a new road had now been finished, and the old one condemned."

"Well, I'd take anything I heard there with a grain of salt," said Sir Samuel. "How should they know? Motor-cars are strange animals to them. If there were a new road the 'Routes' would give it, and I vote for the left."

"Whose car is it, anyway?" Lady Turnour was heard to murmur, not having forgiven my Fellow Worm two burst tyres and a broken chain.

Since chauffeurs should be seen and not heard, Mr. Jack Dane looked volumes and said not a word. Backing the big Aigle, who was sulking in her bonnet, he put her nose to the left. Now we were making straight, almost as the crow flies, for the Cevennes; but luckily for Lady Turnour's peace of mind the snowy tops were hidden from sight behind other mountains' shoulders as we approached. A warning chill was in the air, like the breath of a ghost; but it could not find its way through the glass; and a few cartloads of oranges which we passed opportunely looked warm and attractive, giving a delusive suggestion of the south to our road.

It was gipsy-land, too, for we met several tramping families: boldly handsome women, tall, dark men and boys with eagle eyes, and big silver buttons so well cared for they must have been precious heirlooms. "'Steal all you can, and keep your buttons bright,' is a gipsy father's advice to his son," said Jack Dane, as we wormed up the road toward a pass where the brown mountains seemed to open a narrow, mysterious doorway. So, fold upon fold shut us in, as if we had entered a vast maze from which we might never find our way out; and soon there was no trace of man's work anywhere, except the zigzag lines of road which, as we glanced up or down, looked like thin, pale brown string tied as a child ties a "cat's-cradle." We were in the ancient fastnesses of the Camisards; and this world of dark rock under clouding sky was so stern, so wildly impressive, that it seemed a country hewn especially for religious martyrs, a last stand for such men as fought and died praying, calling themselves "enfants de Dieu." Bending out from the front seat of the motor, my gaze plunged far down into the beds of foaming rivers, or soared far up to the dazzling white world of snow and steely sky toward which we steadily forged on. Oh, there was no hope of hiding the snow now from those whom it might concern! But Lady Turnour still believed, perhaps, that we should avoid it.

The higher the Aigle rose, climbing the wonderful road of snakelike twistings and turnings above sheer precipices, the more thrilling was the effect of the savage landscape upon our souls—those of us who consciously possess souls.

We had met nobody for a long time now; for, since leaving the region of pines, we seemed to have passed beyond the road-mender zone, and the zone of waggons loaded with dry branches like piled elks' horns. Still, as one could never be sure what might not be lurking behind some rocky shoulder, where the road turned like a tight belt, our musical siren sang at each turn its gay little mocking notes.

After a lonely mountain village, named St. Germain-en-Calberte, and famous only because the tyrant-priest Chayla was burned there, the surface of the road changed with startling abruptness. Till this moment we'd known no really bad roads anywhere, and almost all had been as white as snow, as pink as rose leaves, and smooth as velvet; but suddenly the Aigle sank up to her expensive ankles in deep, thick mud.

"Hullo, what's this bumping? Anything wrong with the car?"

Out popped Sir Samuel's anxious head from its luxurious cage.

"The trouble is with the road," answered the chauffeur, without so much as an "I told you so!" expression on his face. "I'm afraid we've come to that declassee part."

Poor Sir Samuel looked so humble and sad that I was sorry for him. "My mistake!" he murmured meekly. "Had we better turn after all?"

"I fear we can't turn, or even run back, sir," said Mr. Dane. "The road's so bad and so narrow, it would be rather risky."

This was a mild way of putting it; and he was considerate in not mentioning the precipice which fell abruptly down under the uneven shelf he generously called a road.

Sir Samuel gave a wary glance down, and said no more. Luckily Lady Turnour, sitting inside her cage, on the side of the rock wall we were following up the mountains, could not see that unpleasant drop under the shelf, or even quite realize that she was on a shelf at all. Her husband sat down by her side, more quietly than he had got up, even forgetting to shut the window; but he was soon reminded of that duty.

"Are you frightened?" the chauffeur asked me; and I thought it no harm to answer: "Not when you're driving."

"Do you mean that? Or is it only an empty little compliment?" he catechized me, though his eyes did not leave the narrow slippery road, up which he was steering with a skill of a woman who aims for the eye of a delicate needle with the end of a thread a size too big.

"I mean it!" I said.

"I'm glad," he answered. "I was going to tell you not to be nervous, for we shall win through all right with this powerful car. But now I will save my breath."

"You may," I said, "I'm very happy." And so I was, though I had the most curious sensation in my toes, as if they were being done up in curl papers.

On we climbed, creeping along the high shelf which was so untidily loaded with rough, fallen stones and layers of mud, powdered with bits of ice from the rocky wall that seemed sheathed in glass. Icicles dangled heavy diamond fringes low over the roof of the car; snow lay in dark hollows which the sun could never reach even in summer noons; and as we ploughed obstinately on, always mounting, the engine trembling, our fat tyres splashed into a custardy slush of whitish brown. The shelf had been slippery before; now, slopping over with this thick mush of melting snow or mud, it was like driving through gallons of ice pudding. The great Aigle began to tremble and waltz on the surface that was no surface; yet it would have been impossible to go back. I saw by my companion's set face how real was the danger we were in; I saw, as the car skated first one way, then another, that there were but a few inches to spare on either side of the road shelf; the side which was a rocky wall, the side which was a precipice; I saw, too, how the man braced himself to this emergency, when three lives besides his own depended on his nerve and skill, almost upon his breath—for it seemed as if a breath too long, a breath too short, might hurl us down—down—I dared not look or think how far. Yet the fixed look of courage and self-confidence on his face was inspiring. I trusted him completely, and I should have been ashamed to feel fear.

But it was at this moment, when all hung upon the driver's steadiness of eye and hand, that Lady Turnour chose to begin emitting squeaks of childish terror. I hadn't known I was nervous, and only found out that I was highly strung by the jump I gave at her first shriek behind me. If the chauffeur had started—but he didn't. He showed no sign of having heard.

I would not venture to turn, and look round, lest the slightest movement of my body so near his arm might disturb him; but poor Sir Samuel, driven to desperation by his wife's hysterical cries, pushed down the glass again.

"Good Lord, Dane, this is appalling!" he said. "My wife can't bear it. Isn't it possible for us to—to—" he paused, not knowing how to end so empty a sentence.

"All that's possible to do I'm doing," returned the chauffeur, still looking straight ahead. And instead of advising the foolish old bridegroom to shake the bride or box her ears, as surely he was tempted to do, he added calmly that her ladyship must not be too anxious. We were going to get out of this all right, and before long.

"Tell him to go back. I shall go back!" wailed Lady Turnour.

"Dearest, we can't!" her husband assured her.

"Then tell him to stop and let me get out and walk. This is too awful. He wants to kill us."

"Can you stop and let us get out?" pleaded Sir Samuel.

"To stop here would be the most dangerous thing we could do," was the answer.

"You hear, Emmie, my darling."

"I hear. Impudence to dictate to you! Whatever you are willing to do, I won't be bearded."

One would have thought she was an oyster. But she was quite right in not wishing to add a beard to her charms, as already a moustache was like those coming events that cast a well-defined shadow before. For an instant I half thought that Mr. Dane would try and stop, her tone was so furious, but he drove on as steadily as if he had not a passenger more fit for Bedlam than for a motor-car.

Seeing that Dane stuck like grim death to his determination and his steering-wheel, Sir Samuel shut the window and devoted himself to calming his wife who, I imagine, threatened to tear open the door and jump out. The important thing was that he kept her from doing it, perhaps by bribes of gold and precious stones, and the Aigle moved on, writhing like a wounded snake as she obeyed the hand on the wheel. If the slightest thing should go wrong in the steering-gear, as we read of in other motor-cars each time we picked up a newspaper—but other cars were not in charge of Mr. Jack Dane. I felt sure, somehow, that nothing would ever go wrong with a steering-gear of whose destiny he was master.

Not a word did he speak to me, yet I felt that my silence of tongue and stillness of body was approved of by him. He had said that we would be "out of this before long," so I believed we would; but suddenly my eyes told me that something worse than we had won through was in store for us ahead.



CHAPTER XXI

All this time we'd been struggling up hill, but abruptly we came to the top of the ascent, and had to go sliding down, along the same shelf, which now seemed narrower than before. Looking ahead, it appeared to have been bitten off round the edge here and there, just at the stiffest zigs and zags of the nightmare road. And far down the mountain the way went winding under our eyes, like the loops of a lasso; short, jerky loops, as we came to each new turn, to which the length of our chassis forced us to bow and curtsey on our slippery, sliding skates. Forward the Aigle had to go until her bonnet hung over the precipice, then to be cautiously backed for a foot or two, before she could glide ticklishly down the next steep gradient.

Involuntarily I shrank back against the cushions, bit my lip, and had to force myself not to catch at the arm of the seat in those giddy seconds when it felt as if we were dropping from sky to earth in a leaky balloon; but if the blood in your veins has been put there by decent ancestors who trail gloriously in a long line behind you, I suppose it's easier for you not to be a coward than it is for people like the Turnours, who have to be their own ancestors, or buy them at auctions.

The first words my companion spoke to me came as the valley below us narrowed. "Look there," he said, nodding; and my gaze followed the indication, to light joyously upon a distant col, where clustered a friendly little group of human habitations.

The sight was like a signal to relax muscles, for though there was a long stretch still of the appalling road between us and the col, the eye seemed to grasp safety, and cling to it.

"Beyond that col we shall strike the route nationale, which we missed by coming this way," said Mr. Dane; and then it was the motor only which gave voice, until we were close to the oasis in our long desert of danger. That comforting voice was like a song of triumph as the Aigle paused to rest at last before a gendarmerie and a rough, mountain inn. Some men who had been standing in front of the buildings gave us a hearty cheer as we drew up at the door, and grinned a pleasant welcome.

"We have been watching you a long way off," said a tall gendarme to the chauffeur, "and to tell the truth we were not happy. That road has been declassee for some time now, and is one of the worst in the country, even in fine weather. It was not a very safe experiment, monsieur; but we have been saying to each other it was a fine way to show off your magnificent driving."

Laughing, Jack Dane assured the gendarme that it was not done with any such object, and Sir Samuel, out of the car by this time, with the indignant Lady Turnour, wanted the conversation translated. I obeyed immediately, and he too praised his chauffeur, in a nice manly way which made me the more sorry for him because he had succeeded in marrying his first love.

"I should like to pay you compliments too," said I hurriedly, in a low voice, when Sir Samuel and Lady Turnour had gone to the inn door to revive themselves with blood-warming cordials after their thrilling experience. "I should like to, only—it seems to go beyond compliments."

"I hate compliments, even when I deserve them, which I don't now," replied the young man whom I'd been comparing sentimentally in my mind with the sun-god, steering his chariot of fire up and down the steeps of heaven from dawn to sunset. "And I'd hate them above all from my—from my little pal."

Nothing he could have named me would have pleased me as well. During the wild climb, and wilder drop, we had hardly spoken to each other, yet I felt that I could never misunderstand him, or try frivolously to aggravate him again. He was too good for all that, too good to be played with.

"You are a man—a real man," I said to myself. I felt humble compared with him, an insignificant wisp of a thing, who could never do anything brave or great in life; and so I was proud to be called his "pal." When he asked if I, too, didn't need some cordial, I only laughed, and said I had just had one, the strongest possible.

"So have I," he answered. "And now we ought to be going on. Look at those shadows, and it's a good way yet to Florac, at the entrance of the gorge."

Already night was stretching long gray, skeleton fingers into the late sunshine, as if to warm them at its glow before snuffing it out.

It was easier to say we ought to go, however, than to induce Lady Turnour to get into the car again, after all she had endured, and after that "bearding" which evidently rankled still. She had not forgiven the chauffeur for the courage which for her was merely obstinacy and impudence, nor her husband for encouraging him; but the glow of the cordial in her veins warmed the cockles of her heart in spite of herself (I should think her heart was all cockles, if they are as bristly as they sound); and as it would be dull to stop on this col for the rest of her life, she at last agreed to encounter further dangers.

"Come, come, that's my brave little darling!" we heard Sir Samuel coo to her, and dared not meet each other's eyes.

The road, from which we ought never to have strayed, was splendid in engineering and surface, and we winged down to earth in a flight from the clouds. Ice and snow were left behind on the heights, and the Aigle gaily careered down the slopes like a wild thing released from a weary bondage. As we whirled earthwards, embankments and railway bridges showed here and there by our side, but we lost all such traces of feverish modern civilization as we swept into the dusky hollow at the bottom of which Florac lay, like a sunken town engulfed by a dark lake.

We did not pause in the curiously picturesque place, which looked no more than a village, with its gray-brown houses and gray brown shadows huddled confusedly together. Probably it looked much the same when the Camisards used to hide themselves and their gunpowder in caves near by; and certainly scarce a stone or brick had been added or removed since Stevenson's eyes saw the town, and his pen wrote of it, as he turned away there from the Tarn region, instead of being the first Englishman to explore it. And what a wild region it looked as we and the Aigle were swallowed up in the yawning mouth of the gorge!

In an every-day world, above and outside, no doubt it was sunset, as on other evenings which we had known and might know again; but this hidden, underground country had no place in an every-day world. It seemed almost as if my brother and I (I can't count the Turnours, for they were so unsuitable that they temporarily ceased to exist for us) were explorers arriving in an air-ship, unannounced, upon the planet Mars.

The moon, a glinting silver shield, shimmered pale through ragged red clouds like torn and blood-stained flags; and the walls of the gorge into which we penetrated, bleakly glittering here and there where the moon touched a vein of mica, were the many-windowed castles of the Martians, who did not yet know that they had visitors from another world.

There were fantastic villages, too, whose builders and inhabitants must have drawn their architectural inspiration from strange mountain forms and groupings, after the fashion of those small animals who defend themselves by looking as much as possible like their surroundings. And if by some mistake we hadn't landed on Mars, we were in gnome-land, wherever that might be.

There was no ordinary twilight here. The brown-gray of rocks and wild rock-villages was flushed with red and shadowed with purple; but as the moon drank up the ruddy draught of sunset, the landscape crouched and hunched its shoulders into shapes ever more extraordinary. The white light spilled down from the tilted crescent like silver rain, and bleached the few pink peach-blossoms, which bloomed timidly under the shelter of snow-mountains, to the pallor of fluttering night-moths, throwing out their clusters in sharp contrast against dark rocks. The River Tarn, gliding onward through the gorge toward the Garonne, was scaled with steel on its emerald back, like a twisting serpent. Over a bed of gravel, white as scattered pearls, the sequined lengths coiled on; and the snake-green water, the strange burnt-coral vegetation like a trail of blood among the pearls, the young foliage of trees, filmy as wisps of blowing gauze, were the only vestiges of colour that the moon allowed to live in the under-world which we had reached. But above, on the roof of that world—"les Causses"—where we had left ice and snow, we could see purple chimneys of rock rising to an opal sky, and now and then a mountain bonfire, like a great open basket of witch-rubies, glowing beneath the moon.

"This is the last haunt of the fairies," I said under my breath, but the man by my side heard the murmur.

"I thought you'd find that out," he said. "Trust you to get telepathic messages from the elf-folk! Why, this gorge teems with fairy tales and legends of magic, black and white. The Rhine Valley and the Black Forest together haven't as many or as wonderful ones. I should like you to hear the stories from some of the village people or the boatmen. They believe them to this day."

"Why, of course," I said, gravely. Then, a question wanted so much to be asked, that when I refused it asked itself in a great hurry, before I could even catch it by its lizard-tail. "Was she with you when you were here before?"

"She?" he echoed. "I don't understand."

"The lady of the battlement garden," I explained, ashamed and repentant now that it was too late.

He did not answer for a moment. Then he laughed, an odd sort of laugh. "Oh, my romance of the battlement garden? Yes, she was with me in this gorge. She is with me now."

"I wonder if she is thinking about you to-night?" I asked, knowing he meant that the mysterious lady was carried along on this journey in his spirit, as I was in the car.

"Not seriously, if at all," he answered, with what seemed to me a forced lightness. "But I am thinking of her—thoughts which she will probably never know."

Then I did wish that I, too, had a hidden sorrow in my life, a man in the background, but as unlike Monsieur Charretier as possible, for whose love I could call upon my brother's sympathy. And I suppose it was because he had some one, while I had no one, in this strange, hidden fairyland like a secret orchard of jewelled fruits, that I felt suddenly very sad.

He pointed out Castlebouc, a spellbound chateau on a towering crag that held it up as if on a tall black finger, above a village which might have fallen off a canvas by Gustave Dore. Farther on lay a strange place called Prades, memorable for a huge buttress of rock exactly like the carcass of a mammoth petrified and hanging on a wall. Then, farther on still, over the black face of the rocks flashed a whiteness of waving waters, pouring cascades like bridal veils whose lace was made of mountain snows.

"Here we are at Ste. Enemie," said Mr. Dane. "Don't you remember about her—'King Dagobert's daughter, ill-fated and fair to look upon?' Well, at this village of hers we must either light our lamps or rest for the night, which ever Sir Samuel—I mean her ladyship—decides."

So he stopped, in a little town which looked a place of fairy enchantment under the moon. And as the song of the motor changed into jogging prose with the putting on of the brakes, open flew the door of an inn. Nothing could ever have looked half so attractive as the rosy glow of the picture suddenly revealed. There was a miniature hall and a quaint stairway—just an impressionist glimpse of both in play of firelight and shadow. With all my might I willed Lady Turnour to want to stay the night. The whole force of my mind pressed upon that part of her "transformation" directly over the deciding-cells of her brain.

The chauffeur jumped down, and respectfully inquired the wishes of his passengers. Would they remain here, if there were rooms to be had, and take a boat in the morning to make the famous descent of the Tarn, while the car went on to meet them at Le Rosier, at the end of the Gorge? Or would they, in spite of the darkness, risk—

"We'll risk nothing," Lady Turnour promptly cut him short. "We've run risks to-day till I feel as if I'd been in my grave and pulled out again. No more for me, by dark, thank you, if I have to sleep in the car!"

"I hope your ladyship won't have to do that," returned my Fellow Worm, alive though trodden under foot. "I have never spent a night in Ste. Enemie, but I've lunched here, and the food is passable. I should think the rooms would be clean, though rough—"

"I don't find this country attractive enough to pay us for any hardships," said the mistress of our fate. "I never was in such a dreary, God-forsaken waste! Are there no decent hotels to get at?"

Patiently he explained to her, as he had to me, how the better hotels which the Gorge of the Tarn could boast were not yet open for the summer. "If we had not had such a chapter of accidents we should have run through as far as this early in the day, and could then have followed the good motoring road down the gorge, seeing its best sights almost as well as from the river; but—"

"Whose fault were the accidents, I should like to know?" demanded the lady. But obviously there was no answer to that question from a servant to a mistress.

"Shall I inquire about rooms?" the chauffeur asked, calmly.

And it ended in Sir Samuel going in with him, conducted by a smiling and somewhat excited young person who had been holding open the door.

They must have been absent for ten minutes, which seemed half an hour. Then, when Lady Turnour had begun muttering to herself that she was freezing, Sir Samuel bustled back, in a cheerfulness put on awkwardly, like an ill-fitting suit of armour in a pageant.

"My dear, they're very full, but two French gentlemen were kind enough to give up their room to us, and the landlady'll put them out somewhere—"

"What, you and I both squashed into one room!" exclaimed her ladyship, forgetful, in haughty horror, of her lodging-house background.

"But it's all they have. It's that or the motor, since you won't risk—"

"Oh, very well, then, I suppose it can't kill me!" groaned the bride, stepping out of the car as if from tumbril to scaffold.

What a way to take an adorable adventure! I was sorry for Sir Samuel, but dimly I felt that I ought to be still sorrier for a woman temperamentally unable to enjoy anything as it ought to be enjoyed. Next year, maybe, she will look back on the experience and tell her friends that it was "fun"; but oh, the pity of it, not to gather the flowers of the Present, to let them wither, and never pluck them till they are dried wrecks of the Past!

I was ready to dance for joy as I followed her ladyship into the miniature hall which, if not quite so alluring when viewed from the inside, had a friendly, welcoming air after the dark mountains and cold white moonlight. I didn't know yet what arrangements had been made for my stable accommodation, if any, but I felt that I shouldn't weep if I had to sit up all night in a warm kitchen with a purry cat and a snory dog.

The stairs were bare, and our feet clattered crudely as we went up, lighted by a stout young girl with bared arms, who carried a candle. "What a hole!" snapped Lady Turnour; but when the door of a bedroom was opened for her by the red-elbowed one, she cried out in despair. "Is this where you expect me to sleep, Samuel? I'm surprised at you! I'm not sure it isn't an insult!"

"My darling, what can I do?" implored the unfortunate bridegroom.

The red-elbowed maiden, beginning to take offence, set the candlestick down on a narrow mantelpiece, with a slap, and removed herself from the room with the dignity of a budding Jeanne d'Arc. We all three filed in, I in the rear; and for one who won't accept the cup of life as the best champagne the prospect certainly was depressing.

The belongings of the "two gentlemen" who were giving up their rights in a lady's favour, had not yet been transferred to the "somewhere outside." Those slippers under the bed could have belonged to no species of human being but a commercial traveller; and on the table and one chair were scattered various vague collars, neckties, and celluloid cuffs. There was no fire in the fireplace, nor, by the prim look of it, had there ever been one in the half century or so since necessity called for an inn to be built.

I snatched from the chair a waistcoat tangled up in some suspenders, and Lady Turnour, flinging herself down in her furs, burst out crying like a cross child.

"If this is what you call adventure, Samuel, I hate it," she whimpered. "You would bring me motoring! I want a fire. I want hot water. I want them now. And I want the room cleared and all these awful things taken away this instant. I don't consider them decent. Whatever happens, I shan't dream of getting into that bed to-night, and I don't feel now as if I should eat any dinner."

Distracted, Sir Samuel looked piteously at me, and I sprang to the rescue. I assured her ladyship that everything should be made nice for her before she quite knew what had happened. If she would have patience for five minutes, only five, she should have everything she wanted. I would see to it myself. With that I ran away, followed by Sir Samuel's grateful eyes. But, once downstairs, I realized what a task I had set myself.

The whole establishment had gone mad over us. There had been enough to do before, with the house full of ces messieurs, les commis voyageurs, but it was comparatively simple to do for them. For la noblesse Anglaise it was different.

There were no men to be seen, and the three or four women of the household were scuttling about crazily in the kitchen, like hens with their heads cut off. The patronage was so illustrious and so large; there was so much to do and all at once, therefore nobody tried to do anything but cackle and plump against one another.

Enter Me, a whirlwind, demanding an immediate fire and hot water for washing. Landlady and assistants were aghast. There had never been anything in any bedroom fireplace of the inn less innocent than paper flowers; bedroom fireplaces were for paper flowers; while as for washing it was a betise to want to do so in the evening, especially with hot water, which was a madness at any time, unless by doctor's orders. Besides, did not mademoiselle see that everybody had more than they could do already, in preparing dinner for the great people! There was plenty of time to put the bedroom in order when it should be bedtime. If the noble lady were so fatigued that she must lie down, why, the bed had only been slept in for one night by two particularly sympathetic messieurs. It would be presque un crime to change linen after so brief an episode, nevertheless for a client of such importance it should eventually be done.

For a moment I was dashed by this volume of eloquence, but not for long, for I was pledged. A wild glance round the kitchen showed me a kettle standing empty in a corner. I seized it, and though it was heavy, swung it to an open door near which I could see a ghostly pump. I flew out, and seized that ghost by its long and rigid arm.

"Let me," said a voice.

It was the voice of Mr. Jack Dane.



CHAPTER XXII

"You dear!" I thought. But I only said, "How sweet of you!" in a nice, ladylike tone. And while he pumped the wettest and coldest water I ever felt, he drily advised me to call him "Adversity" if I found his "uses sweet," since he wasn't to be Jack for me. What if he had known that I always call him "Jack" to myself?

He not only pumped the kettle full, but carried it into the kitchen, and bullied or flattered the goddesses there until they gave him the hottest place for it on the red-hot stove. Meanwhile, as my eyes accustomed themselves to darkness after light, I spied in the courtyard of the pump a shed piled with wood; and my uncomfortably prophetic soul said that if Lady Turnour were to have a fire, the woodpile and I must do the trick together. Souls can be mistaken though, sometimes, if consciences never can; and Brother Adversity contradicted mine by darting out again to see what I was doing, ordering me to stop, and doing it all himself.

I ran to beg for immediate bed-linen while he annexed a portion of the family woodpile, and we met outside my mistress's door. On the threshold I confidently expected her grateful ladyship to say: "What are you doing with that wood, Dane?" But she was too much crushed under her own load of cold and discomfort to object to his and wish it transferred to me. I'd knelt down to make a funeral pyre of paper roses, when in a voice low yet firm my brother ordered me to my feet. This wasn't work for girls when men were about, he grumbled; and perhaps it was as well, for I never made a wood fire in my life. As for him, he might have been a fire-tamer, so quickly did the flames leap up and try to lick his hands. When it was certain that they couldn't go stealthily crawling away again, he shot from the room, and in two minutes was back with the big kettle of hot water under whose weight I should have staggered and fallen, perhaps.

By this time I had made the bed, and tumbled all reminders of the two "sympathetic messieurs" ruthlessly into no-man's land outside the door. Things began to look more cheerful. Lady Turnour brightened visibly; and when appetizing smells of cooking stole through the wide cracks all round the door she decided that, after all, she would dine.

It was not until after I had seen her descend with her husband, and had finished unpacking, that I had a chance to think of my own affairs. Then I did wonder on what shelf I was to lie, or on what hook hang, for the night. I had no information yet as regarded my own sleeping or eating, but both began to assume importance in my eyes, and I went down to learn my fate. Where was I to dine? Why, in the kitchen, to be sure, since the salle a manger was in use as a sitting-room until bedtime. As for sleeping—why, that was a difficult matter. It was true that the English milord had spoken of a room for me, but in the press of business it had been forgotten. What a pity that the chauffeur and I were not a married couple, n'est pas? That would make everything quite simple. But—as it was, no doubt there was a box-room, and matters would arrange themselves when there was time to attend to them.

"Matters have already arranged themselves," announced Mr. Jack Dane, from the door of the pump-court. "I heard Sir Samuel speak about your accommodation, and I saw that nothing was being done, so I discovered the box-room, and it is now ready, all but bed-covering. And for fear there might be trouble about that, I've put Lady Turnour's cushions and rugs on the alleged bed. Would you like to have a look at your quarters now, or are you too hungry to care?"

"I'm not too hungry to thank you," I exclaimed. "You are a kind of genie, who takes care of the poor who have neither lamps nor rings to rub."

"Better not thank me till you've seen the place," said he. "It's a villainous den; but I didn't think any one here would be likely to do better with it than I would. Anyhow, you'll find hot water. I unearthed—literally—another kettle. And it's the first door at the top of the back stairs."

I flew, or rather stumbled, up the ladder-like stairway, with a candle which I snatched from the high kitchen mantelpiece, and at the top I laughed out, gaily. In the narrow passage was a barricade of horrors which my knight had dragged from the box-room. On strange old hairy trunks of cowhide he had piled broken chairs, bandboxes covered with flowered wall-paper, battered clocks, chipped crockery, fire-irons, bundles done up in blankets, and a motley collection of unspeakable odds and ends that would have made a sensational jumble sale. I opened the low door, and peeped into the room with which such liberties had been taken for my sake. Although it was no more than a store cupboard, my wonderful brother had contrived to give it quite an air of coziness. The tiny window was open, and was doing its best to drive out mustiness. A narrow hospital cot stood against the wall, spread with a mattress quite an inch thick, and piled with the luxurious rugs and cushions from the motor car. I was sure Lady Turnour would have preferred my sitting up all night or freezing coverless rather than I should degrade her possessions by making use of them; but Mr. Dane evidently hadn't thought her opinion of importance compared with her maid's comfort. Two wooden boxes, placed one upon another, formed a wash-hand stand, which not only boasted a beautiful blue tin basin, but a tumbler, a caraffe full of water, and a not-much-cracked saucer ready for duty as a soap-dish. The top box was covered with a rough, clean towel, evidently filched from the kitchen, and this piece of extra refinement struck me as actually touching. A third box standing on end and spread with another towel, proclaimed itself a dressing-table by virtue of at least half a looking glass, lurking in one corner of a battered frame, like a sinister, partially extinguished eye. Other furnishings were a kitchen chair and a small clothes-horse, to compensate for the absence of wall-hooks or wardrobe. On the bare floor—oh, height of luxury!—lay the fleecy white rug whose high mission it was to warm the toes of Lady Turnour when motoring. On the floor beside the box wash-hand stand, a small kettle was pleasantly puffing, doing its best to heat the room with its gusty breath; and the clothes-horse had a saddle of towels which I shrewdly suspected had been intended for her ladyship or some other guest of importance in the house.

How these wonders had been accomplished in such a short space of time, and by a man, too, would have passed my understanding, had I not begun to know what manner of man the chauffeur was. And to think that there was a woman in the world who had known herself loved by him, yet had been capable of sending him away! If he would do such things as these for an acquaintance, at best a "pal," what would he not do for a woman beloved? I should have liked to duck that creature under the pump in the court, on just such a nipping night as this.

He had not forgotten my dressing bag, which was on the bed, but I could not stop to open it. I had to run down to the kitchen again, and tell him what I thought of his miracles. He was not there, but, at the sound of my voice, he appeared at the door of the court, drying his hands, having doubtless been making his toilet at the accommodating pump. In the crude light of unshaded paraffin lamps with tin reflectors, he looked tired, and I was sharply reminded of the nervous strain he had gone through in that ordeal on the mountains, but he smiled with the delight of a boy when I burst into thanks.

"It was jolly good exercise, and limbered me up a bit, after sitting with my feet on the brake for so long," said he. "May I have my dinner with you?"

My answer was rather enthusiastic, and that seemed to please him, too. A quarter of an hour later I came down again, having made myself tidy meanwhile, in the room which he had retrieved from the jungle. Had the landlady but had the ordering of the change, my quarters would have been fifty per cent. less attractive, I was sure, and told my brother so.

We were both starving, but there was too much to do in the dining-room for domestics to expect attention. As for Monsieur le Chauffeur, he was informed that the presence of a mechanician would be permitted in the salle a manger, though a femme de chambre might not enter there. I begged him to go, but, of course, I should have been surprised if he had. "I have a plan worth two of that," he said to me. "Do you remember the picnic preparations we brought from Nimes? It seems about a week ago, but it was only this morning. We might as well try to eat on a battlefield as in this kitchen, at present, and if we're kept waiting, we may develop cannibal propensities. What about a picnic a deux in the glass cage, with electric illuminations? The water's still hot in the automatic heater under the floor, and you shall be as warm as toast. Besides, I'll grab a jug of blazing soup for a first course, and come back for coffee afterward."

I clapped my hands as I used to when a child and my fun-loving young parents proposed an open air fete. "Oh, how too nice!" I cried. "If you don't think the Turnours would be angry?"

"I think the labourers are worthy of their hire," said he. "I'll fetch your coat for you. No, you're not to come without it."

The car, it appeared, was lodged in the court; and my brother's prophecies for the success of the picnic were more than fulfilled. Never was such a feast! I got out the gorgeous tea-basket, trembling with a guilty joy, and Jack washed the white and gold cups and plates at the pump between courses, I drying them with cotton waste, which the car generously provided. Besides the cabbage soup and good black coffee, foraging expeditions produced apricot tarts, nuts, and raisins. We both agreed that no food had ever tasted so good, and probably never would again; but I kept to myself one thought which crept into my mind. It seemed to me that nothing would ever be really interesting in my life, when the chauffeur—the terrible, dreaded chauffeur—should have gone out of it forever. In a few weeks—but I wouldn't think ahead; I put my soul to enjoying every minute, even the tidying of the tea-basket after the picnic was over, for that business he shared with me, like the rest. And when I dreamed, by-and-by in my box-room, that he was polishing my boots, Lady Turnour's boots, the boots of the whole party, I waked up to tell myself that it was most likely true.



CHAPTER XXIII

"You selfish little brute!" was my first address to myself as I realized my Me-ness, between waking and sleeping, in the morning at Ste. Enemie. I had never asked Jack where and how he was going to spend the night. Think of that, after all he had done for me!

It was only just dawn, but already there was a stirring under my window. Perhaps it was that which had roused me, not the early prick of an awakening conscience.

The first thing I did to-day was (as it had been yesterday) to bounce up and climb on to a chair to look out of the high window; but it was a very different window and a very different scene. I now discovered that my room gave on the pump court, and to my surprise, I saw that through the blue silk blinds of the Aigle which were all closely drawn, a light was streaming. This was very queer indeed, and must mean something wrong. My imagination pictured a modern highwayman inside, with the electric lamps turned on to help him rifle the car, and I stood on tiptoe, peering out of the tiny aperture which was close under the low ceiling of the box-room. Ought I to scream, and alarm the household, since I knew not where to go and call the chauffeur?

To be sure, there was very little, if anything, of value, which a thief could carry away, but an abandoned villain might revenge himself for disappointment by slashing the tyres, or perhaps even by setting the car on fire.

At the thought of such a catastrophe, which would bring the trip to an end and separate me at once from the society of my brother (I'm afraid I cared much more about losing him than for the Turnours' loss of their Aigle) I was impelled to run down in my nightgown and mules to do battle single-handed with the ruffian; but suddenly, before I had quite decided, out went the light in the blue-curtained glass cage. In another instant the car door opened, and Jack Dane quietly got out.

In a second I understood. I knew now, without asking, where he had spent his night. Poor fellow—after such a day!

Someone spoke to him—someone who had been making that disturbing noise in the woodshed. The household was astir, and I would be astir, too. I didn't yet know what was to happen to-day, but I wanted to know, and I was prepared to find any plan good, since, in a country like this, all roads must lead to Adventures. My one fear was, that if the Turnours took to a boat, I should have to go with them to play cloak-bearer, or hot-water-bag-carrier, while the car whirled away, free and glorious. The thought of a whole day in my master's and mistress's society, undiluted by the saving presence of my adopted brother, was like bolting a great dry crust of yesterday's bread. What an indigestion I should have!

I was too wise, however, to betray the slightest anxiety one way or the other; for if her ladyship suspected me of presuming to have a preference she would punish me by crushing it, even if inconvenient to herself. I was exquisitely meek and useful, lighting her fire (with wood brought me by Jack) supplying her with hot water, and wrangling with the landlady over her breakfast, which would have consisted of black coffee and unbuttered bread, had it not been for my exertions. Breakfasts more elaborate were unknown at Ste. Enemie; but coaxings and arguments produced boiled eggs, goats' milk, and confiture, which I added to the repast, and carried up to Lady Turnour's room.