Cynthia Steps Out

CHAPTER 2

Paris

CORNED BEEF HASH

Steamship and steamer friends had been left behind. Paris was ahead, closer now with every minute, every hurrying second. The little French girl who had kept on her hat and gloves and had read, in silence, a paper covered copy of Anatole France all the way from Cherbourg, let down the window, leaned out to wave a beckoning hand, and shouted, “Porteur! Porteur!”

Cynthia waited patiently, but as the other seemed in no haste to relinquish her place at the window, the American finally leaned over the French girl’s shoulder and beckoned in similar fashion. The long train slid gently to a stop and a score of stout little blue smocked men seemed to spring from the ground and began taking baggage from the open windows, loading it on wide straps over their sturdy shoulders.

Cynthia captured the eye of number 972; a beady eye above a red nose and a moustache that would have graced a member of the Beggar’s Opera. She gulped, “Taxi!”—thank goodness, there was a word that meant the same in several languages, at which he grinned cheerfully and slung her heavy suitcase and her paint box in one huge paw. The other grasped her neighbor’s bags and the whole strange and unwieldy combination lumbered off down the platform. Was he gone for good? Better follow that French girl, Cynthia decided. She seemed unconcerned. Oh, one had to give up the ticket here, and there was the porter again. No more customs, that had all been cleared at the quay, earlier in the morning.

The street met her with a blast of warm July air, a dazzle of summer sunlight and such a medley of strange noises: taxis hooting in a new, high key; shrill-pitched voices, mingled shouts and confusion, that she stood for a moment bewildered and lost. Horrid luck that no one she knew from the boat had been coming to Paris on this train!

Then Cynthia saw that her bag and paint box had been piled into a taxi like a shiny black beetle and the blue smocked one waited for his pourboire. She tipped him ten francs. Was that too much, or too little? She had been warned that, in either case, he would glare, but this one smiled, muttered, “Merci!” and departed. The hotel address was written on a card and Cynthia had only to show that to the driver, hop in, and they were off.

“Well!”

“Well, so this is Paris!”

“Well ...,” Cynthia giggled nervously. To be really here. To have arrived safely, all by herself. Well, that was something. “Paris!”

She sighed, relaxed back against the cushions and closed her eyes for a moment. Oh, the taxi was stopping. Her eyes popped open. Just a little policeman in a toy soldier cape and a white stick with which he seemed, miraculously, to hold up this mad traffic. Off again. She shut her eyes once more. New smells, hot asphalt, violets, damp warm air, something cooking, other things. She just couldn’t keep her eyes shut.

The car was running along gray cobbles between gray houses high and incredibly ancient. Tall, plane trees leaned out over gray walls that held in a silvery stream. The Seine! A little gay colored steamer, like a miniature ferry-boat, hooted and put off from a landing. Cynthia wanted to hug it all at once, to pinch herself to be sure she was here. How she wished Judy could see it, and Chick, dear Chick. This was to have been their honeymoon. He’d be over shortly, a few weeks at the most. And meanwhile there was work to be done; a language to learn, Nancy and Mrs. Brewster to see, and covers to be done for Little One’s Magazine.

Was that, could that possibly be, Notre Dame over there to the left? And the Eiffel Tower clear ahead, misty against sunny sky? She had seen it as they came in on the train. Really Paris!

“Not a motion picture!” chuckled Cynthia. And tomorrow she could go and see it all for herself.

Then a second bridge, Place St. Michel. And a swift turn to the left into a narrow street where noises echoed back from the high stone houses to right and left. They drew up before a door and a boy, in a horizontal striped waistcoat and white shirt sleeves, came out from the hotel entrance. Here was her home in Paris.

Inside, at the little brass-railed desk, they had a key for her room and a letter from Mrs. Brewster, who had made her reservation for her. There was a little cage-like elevator into which one squeezed, barely avoiding the folding doors, and then up, up, like a wobbly balloon. A hallway musty and dark, and at last a tall room with two high French windows opening on to a small balcony.

“Yes, this will do nicely,” said Cynthia in her best French, and so moved into Paris.

When the door closed, Cynthia sat down to catch her breath. So much had happened in the last half hour, she had seen so much that was new, and strange, and lovely. “I suppose there are people that live in Paris all the time and take it as a matter of course,” she told herself. “And, I suppose, I shall get to take it that way too, after a bit. But now it’s all rather frightening. I wonder if I can make myself understood, I wonder if I shall get lost, I wonder ... oh goodness, how shall I order meals? But perhaps menu French is the same everywhere.”

Mrs. Brewster’s letter was reassuring. She seemed to think Cynthia would find everything very simple and easy. “But I am giving you the address of a little French girl, who speaks excellent English, she was a governess in London for some years. If you get lonely, or wish to improve your accent,” ha, accent! “don’t hesitate to look her up.” Enclosed was also a note from Nancy.

“Do come to Conquet,” she begged. “Mother and I are both painting here. It’s all pearly gray mists and long, empty beaches and sabots, and fish and steep streets and old houses. And you can find lots of children to pose for your covers.”

It did sound fun. But Paris seemed quite enough adventure for the moment. And Cynthia’s purse was very flat. She must first see Mr. Culbert, who was over here now, and was the editor of the magazine for which she had a contract for a dozen covers, see if she couldn’t get an advance on the first order, and if he could put her in touch with a way to get models. Just at the moment she hadn’t the slightest idea how to go about getting one for the painting she must do.

She sat down and wrote to Nancy, planning to mail the letter when she went out to dinner. Then leaning out on the little balcony, she watched the light fade in the street below, listening to the sounds of Paris echo up between the ancient, stained, backward sloping housefronts.

What, she wondered, with a little pang of homesickness, were they doing now at home? Six o’clock ... but no, time was different. Was it three over there, or nine, now? The mental gymnastics made her head reel and she decided that she was hungry. But plenty of time yet. Cynthia hated to admit to herself that she dreaded that first meal alone, doubted her ability to order food, even to find her way home again, once she had set her foot off the hotel doorstep. It was after eight o’clock when she finally tore herself away from the window and summoned courage to go out for dinner. “You can’t starve till morning, idiot!” she told herself severely. “Just walk downstairs, and out the door. There must be lots of places to eat within the next two blocks. Why, France is a nation of cooks!”

A short way up the Boule’ Miche’, she found a little place with pretty red-and-white checked table cloths on the iron topped tables, behind dusty box hedges in their wooden boxes. This was pleasantly removed from a small band that was playing lustily, and not too melodiously, on the street corner. Funny about those bands. She had passed three in the short distance from the hotel and another had begun playing beneath her window just as she went out.

No one else seemed to be eating. Perhaps French people dined later than this. The menu was as much an enigma as she had expected. It was written in a flowing Spencerian hand, in dim violet ink on a limp and food-stained bit of paper. Hardly a word seemed legible, and none of it was intelligible. “Goodness,” murmured Cynthia, and looked about her. Could she get up and leave, and try another place? But the waiter had already placed a napkin beside her, fork and knife beside the napkin. Cynthia decided she hadn’t the moral courage to rise and depart. Well, here goes!

“Bring me some of that, and that, and that,” she directed and pointed near the center of the page. The main body of a meal always came near the middle of the menu, didn’t it?

The waiter, who wore a spotty black dinner jacket and a white apron, broke into a voluble explanation of some sort. Evidently they were out of this, would mademoiselle not prefer that? Mademoiselle nodded in agreement. Yes, anything. Oui, oui, oui! The waiter departed on swift feet. Cynthia wondered what he would bring.

What he brought was a strange piece of pink meat swimming in a cold bath of oil. This she poked about with a fork, wondering what particular portion of what animal it might be. It hardly seemed edible, and certainly though she was hungry, she was not yet hungry enough for that. After a long time the waiter seemed to appreciate that she had finished with that course, and brought her some hot boiled potatoes. These were more palatable. And bread helped too. Then came a small white something wrapped in tin foil, and served with a large salt shaker.

But the foil proved to contain a small roll of really delicious cream cheese, and eaten with sugar, which came from the large salt shaker, and more of the crisp French bread. It served to round off the simple meal.

“I suppose I have eaten,” thought Cynthia as she wandered home again. “I wish I weren’t still so hungry. At least that meal was cheap, and that’s important at the moment.” But she continued to think of hot beefsteaks, and hot muffins, and hot chicken pies, and what she wouldn’t do to a big plate of ham and eggs. ... Oh dear! But tomorrow she’d try another place. Perhaps that wasn’t a really good example of French cooking.

As she strolled slowly back towards the hotel all the little bands were going full force. Cynthia noticed that people were beginning to dance, under the lights, on the hard cobbled pavements to the jiggling, monotonous tunes. She leaned for a while against the closed iron shutter of a shop, and watched the gay crowds gather. They seemed very happy. Was it some celebration, she wondered, or did French people always dance like this in the evening? The musicians beneath her window were in fine fettle, tootling, sawing, and bumping away at no particular tune, but just a sort of penny whistle noise with a strongly marked rhythm for the dancers.

She sat in her window watching them till she got so sleepy she could no longer keep her eyes open, then deciding they’d probably keep it up pretty late, till ten or maybe eleven, crawled into bed. It had been a long day since Cherbourg that morning, and in spite of the band, which surely must stop before midnight, she thought she could sleep.

But the monotonous, tuneless sound seemed to go round, and round, and round inside her head. She dreamed that she was waltzing rapidly with the garçon of the striped waistcoat, with Madame in her black taffeta dress and wide gold chain, with the black cat of the restaurant. Then woke to hear the band still scraping, and bumping merrily. Foggily she struggled out of bed and closed first the heavy wooden shutters, then the window and went back to sleep with her head hot under the bedclothes. Twice she woke again at odd hours, but always that rhythm penetrated the darkness.

Then she woke again. Surprisingly all was still. How blissful that was! She was sure the musicians had stopped only a short time ago, and waited tensely to see if they would start again. But there was no sound. Then rolling over with aching head she saw that light streamed from between the chinks of the shutters, and that her watch said seven o’clock.

She opened her window, went back to bed and slept till nine. Then she wandered out to find breakfast. Only a gnawing hunger had made her get up at all.

Strangely enough none of the restaurants seemed to be open. She peered in at two, between drawn net curtains, to see chairs piled on empty tables, and boys washing down the floors. Then rounding a corner Cynthia came full on the Seine, between its gray stone banks, and a gray stone bridge beyond which loomed, full in the summer sunlight, the twin towers of Notre Dame de Paris. Oh lovely!

Along the embankment were the tiny stalls of the booksellers, all closed now. Didn’t Paris people go to work until noon, she wondered?

Then at the end of the block, facing a small open square she saw a sign which read “Café, Chocolat.” Here, perhaps, she could get some sort of meal. Outdoors, under a gay striped awning she found a little wicker table with a red and white top, and wicker chairs. A big black cat with a white bib, and green eyes gave her welcome with purrs and ankle rubbings. This was going to be jolly. She stammered her desire for chocolate, and learned that “little breads,” and butter could also be procured, and that little breads were really crisp warm rolls.

Notre Dame faced her, serene, solid, impregnable. When breakfast was over she’d go across and visit the church, and stroll along by the river. This must be the famous Left Bank, where all the artists and students lived.

The cat rubbed, purring, about the table, and a small boy with eyes as softly dark as the cat’s fur, and clad in a diminutive smock of black, with a small black beret perched on his dark curls came out to stare solemnly at this stranger. Cynthia buttered a piece of roll, and offered it to him. With a shy, “Merci!” muttered in an oddly deep voice he took it, bolted it, and watched for the next mouthful. Cynthia grinned at him, ate a bit herself and gave him, thereafter, alternate bites. By the time two rolls were finished, and the big pitcher of hot chocolate was drained to the last sweet drop, the small boy had smiled also, had told her that his name was Nono, and that he lived here. Here at last was a friend. Tomorrow she’d bring a sketchbook to breakfast.

When tomorrow came Nono appeared, along with his black cat, for more bits of warm roll. But this time he smiled immediately, crinkling his dark eyes with an amused and delightful welcome. When his father brought the chocolate, he said something in brief reproof, but Cynthia protested. “Let him stay,” she begged and displayed her sketchbook.

The man grinned and nodded. He knew about artists, and explained to the boy that he must sit still for mademoiselle. Whereat Nono climbed into one of the café chairs, and grasping firm hold of the huge and somewhat reluctant cat, proceeded to demonstrate that he was born to be an artist’s model.

Oh, this was glorious. Cynthia’s fingers flew to get it all down before it could dissolve, and when the cat finally went calmly to sleep, Nono continued to sit immovable, wide eyed, minutes on minutes. Cynthia got more and more thrilled. It was going to be a honey of a sketch. She wondered if, maybe, colors tomorrow. ...

At last she nodded to the child. He laughed and stretched, and dumped the sleeping cat from his knees. Cynthia put two francs in his small hand. Was that, she wondered, too much, or too little? It was what her breakfast had cost her. Apparently, by his reception, it was all right.

“Tomorrow?” she asked in French, and pointed toward the chair again.

“Oui, oui, Demain,” agreed Nono. Then he must know that artists sometimes wanted one to pose again.

That was on Sunday. Saturday had not been strikingly successful. For some reason, perhaps because it was Saturday, everything, banks and the Express Company, Mr. Culbert’s office and most of the museums Cynthia wished to visit, had been closed. Monday, of course, they would be open again, and she could get in touch with Mr. Culbert. Cynthia’s money was running low and she must ask for an advance on the first cover, and must find some way to get in touch with models to work from.

But Monday was no better than Sunday, nor than Saturday had been. The band, for the third time, had played all night, and Cynthia had slept fitfully, hot and miserable in the closed, noisy room. She awoke feeling as though she could sleep for a week. Then she remembered Nono. Here at last was one bright spot in Paris. She hurried out to breakfast with her large sketch pad and her color box under her arm.

Nono was waiting for her, and so was the black cat. Cynthia was ravenously hungry. A continental breakfast wasn’t enough food to last one through a day of sightseeing, and so far she had found no good place to eat. Hastily she drank her chocolate, shared a double order of rolls and butter with the somewhat greedy little Nono. She herself was anxious to get to work on this color sketch.

Nono, complete with the large sleepy cat, clambered into his wicker chair. The sunlight reflected warm and yellow beneath his chin and his eyes were half closed, amusingly, in the glare. The black smock seemed almost a dark green in contrast to the cat’s soft fur, and beyond them was the red and white ruffle of the awning, a brilliant splash of warm color. Cynthia asked to have her little painting pail filled with water, sketched in the brief outline of her composition, and slashed happily into color. Once she said, mechanically “Rest!” and found that the boy understood. In a few minutes he returned to his place. The cat was a little different, but Cynthia had allowed for that, and now sketched him in and completed that part of the drawing all in one pose.

The drawing was emerging with both charm and strength. Black, red and warm flesh tones accented with the green of the cat’s eyes, and one white paw lifted to rest against Nono’s black smock. This, thought Cynthia, was one of the nicest things she had ever done. Even fatigue and hunger seemed to have added to her ability since her senses seemed sharpened, nerves tautened by the past two days.

She had decided to go that afternoon and find the little French girl Mrs. Brewster had recommended for language lessons. Her visit to the Express Company, and to the office where she had hoped to find Mr. Culbert were as unsuccessful as Saturday’s visits. Everything was still closed tight.

Cynthia was beginning to worry. She had only a few hundred francs, about fifteen dollars, left in her purse and there was no telling how long this celebration might last. It puzzled her. She had asked Madame at the desk and had learned that it was the “Fourteenth of July,” whatever that was! But Friday had been the fourteenth. Surely they didn’t celebrate America’s Fourth of July over here, did they? Foggily she tried to connect it with Lafayette and the two Revolutions, but couldn’t make it out. Everywhere the little street bands continued to play and people continued to dance in the streets.

Still pondering on this mystery she found the house on the Boulevard St. Michel that bore the address of the Mademoiselle Menard. Mrs. Brewster had explained that she lived on the fifth floor and that “in France the first floor is not the ground floor, nor the next, which is called the entresol. You have to go up two flights to get to the first floor and then begin to count from there!” They were long flights, too, and Cynthia had begun to feel a little faint by the time she reached the top. When she found Mr. Culbert, if she ever did, she would certainly beg him to take her out for a real dinner!

Cynthia put her finger on the large white push button and a bell pealed somewhere way off inside. But no one answered it. After a bit she tried again, and then again. What should she do next? She already had visited Notre Dame, and knew the Cluny and Luxembourg Gardens, for the past two days, as well as the palm of her hand. Besides she still felt strangely faint. She leaned against the heavy stone balustrade and looked down.

Suddenly up through the hallway, wafted from below came the most glorious and enchanting odor. Cynthia closed her eyes. It made her think of home, of a loaded dinner table with big plates of corned-beef hash, with an egg on top, slabs of bread and butter, and a thick slice of apple pie with cheese. Oh dear!

Like a good little hound following the scent, Cynthia, hypnotized by that delicious smell, stepped down, step after step, to the floor below. Still that beckoning, delightful odor. Another flight. It was stronger now, over the banisters.

“Heavens!” thought Cynthia. “How can I ever stand this?”

Here was the door and she had tracked it to its lair. A door, heavy and thick and solid, like those above. It was open just a crack, which was why the lovely smell had wandered out. Cynthia leaned against the doorpost. There were tears of hunger and of homesickness in her eyes as she sniffed ... and sniffed. Onions in that hash, too! No calves head in cold oil here, no tough thin steaks that might, or might not, be horsemeat!

Then the door opened with a whoosh and Cynthia almost fell through it into the hall beyond.

“’Ello!” said a cheery voice in French. Another girl, shorter than Cynthia but about her own age, with an amusing long nose, twinkly brown eyes, her hair covered by a chic little straw hat with a red quill, a white wool dress embroidered in red.

The girl continued to chatter something in French. Cynthia looked as blank as a brick wall; she had been wrenched all too suddenly from that corned-beef-hash day-dream.

“Say!” cried the girl suddenly. “You’re an American, too, aren’t you?”

Cynthia could have hugged her, right then and there. Why she hadn’t heard a word of English for three whole days.

“Oh, yes!” she almost shouted. “And oh, is that hash you are cooking?”

The girl giggled, then sniffed appreciatively. “Does smell good, doesn’t it? Mother’s a swell cook. Look here ...” she opened the door that had half closed behind her. “Hey, Mums, have we got enough for a guest?” and before Cynthia could object, had shoved her ahead, down the hallway, into a wide room lit by late sunlight.

“Take off your mittens and bonnet and shawl,” laughed the girl. “You’re invited to dinner ... that is if you can stay. Mums, this is Miss America, winner of all beauty prizes to date, isn’t she pretty? ...” Heavens how the girl did rattle on, thought the amused Cynthia. ... “I found her fainting on our doorstep and brought her in.”

“Mums” was wide and comfortable looking in a huge white apron and carried a turning-spoon in her hand. She seemed unperturbed by her daughter’s nonsense.

“My name’s Wanstead, Cynthia,” explained the owner of that name. “And I do hope you will forgive me. I sniffed your delicious cooking two flights up.”

“Good grief, I must have left that door open again!” rattled the girl. “We’d just about lose our French lease if they sniff our cooking in the hall. Oh, I forgot, my name is Murchison. This is Mrs. Murchison, my honored parent. ... Listen I’ve got to run out with some letters for the post. Sit still and I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

Cynthia was only too glad to sit. Normally she would have protested more strongly against their forced hospitality, but today, homesick and genuinely hungry and considerably worried about the future, she found this American household irresistible. Mrs. Murchison puttered into the room and out again murmuring absentmindedly: “Father loves corn-beef hash. ... Can’t get French cook to make it properly. ... Marie, our cook, gone home for the holidays ...” and still murmuring disappeared at last in the direction of the kitchen.

Over the delicious dinner Cynthia heard the story of the mysterious holiday. “It’s the Jour de Bastille,” Alice explained to her, “in celebration of the destruction of that beastly prison. The French never have a half-holiday. They save it up and make four days of it. Father’s in the consular service and had to be home for tomorrow morning, but most Americans who live here plan to stay out of Paris during these four days, they’re so noisy. Our cook won’t be worth her salt for the next week, she’ll be so sleepy. If you ask me, you look half asleep.”

“I’ve had one of those bands under my window for the past three nights,” apologized Cynthia. “Please, can I have some more hash?”

“Save room for real American ice cream,” advised her hostess, and, when dinner was over, “I’m going to tuck you into bed right away, you poor thing. It’s only seven and you can sleep till ten or eleven. Then I’ll wake you to go home. Come on, my room is at the back, on the garden, you won’t hear a single drum or whistle or even a taxi horn.”

Cynthia was too weary to utter more than a feeble protest. “It seems kind of funny to break into a stranger’s house, eat their hash and go to sleep in their bed,” she murmured as she slipped off her shoes.

“Take off your dress. That’s right. I’ll just throw a blanket over you and open this window a little. Sleep doucement!”

Cynthia started to call, “Don’t fail to wake me,” but must have been asleep before she could speak the words. At least when she awoke an apparent few minutes later the sentence still hung unuttered, in her mind. She stretched, blinked, fumbled for her thoughts, then glared at the window. It was full daylight!

Frantically she bent to look at her watch. It had stopped. Then it was next day? The little clock on the bureau said “eight o’clock” and then Alice, tousle headed, in bright pink candy-striped pyjamas peeped round the edge of the door.

“Hello you! Gosh how you did sleep! Are you by any chance a descendant of the Sleeping Beauty? I phoned your hotel so they wouldn’t think you had got run over, and went in to sleep with Mother.”

She pranced into the room and perched on the foot of the bed. “It’s a swell day. And things started to move again today. You’ll find your little editor chap, no doubt. Will you have your breakfast on a tray in here, milady, and go back to sleep again?”

“Goodness no! Oh, I feel fine.” Cynthia swung her feet out of bed.

It was nearly noon, however, when Cynthia sent her name to Mr. Culbert, the editor of Little Ones’ Magazine. He came out immediately, a plump little man with a round jolly face and held out both hands, beaming his welcome.

“Such a shame you landed here in the middle of the holiday. I was down in the south of France with the owner of the magazine, but got back last night. Now, my dear child, about those covers of yours, I suppose you want to get right at them. About models ... that’s going to be a bit difficult. Children, you know. ...”

“Not a bit difficult.” Cynthia’s eyes were dancing. “I’ve been working,” she said demurely.

“What, not already? Well, you are a wonder! Oh, you’ve got something there? Come into the office, will you? This is just a borrowed place and I hate it. Drat these French chairs. I like a good old swivel chair I can lean back in. Shall be glad to get back to the States myself. Now let’s see. ...”

He had chatted incessantly as he led the way into a room resembling more a window display of a decorator’s shop than an office. Cynthia perched on the corner of the elaborate inlaid desk and slipped the wrapper off her drawing, the one Nono, over her second breakfast, had finished posing for, just a half hour ago.

“Here you are.” She knew it was good. Would he think so too? Gosh, he liked it! She could tell by his face.

“Sa ... ay, that’s fine. My dear child, you have certainly surpassed anything you have done yet.” He set it on the floor, propped against the wall and leaned back to squint at it.

It was nice to be praised and Cynthia felt herself getting warm and pink cheeked. Yes, she knew Nono had been her best effort ... to date. “There’ll be better ones, though,” she told the little editor. “I’m going to Brittany next week to join the Brewsters, and to paint. I’ll do you a Breton child for the issue after this one.”

Mr. Culbert got up and took her arm. “Now we’ll go and get a check made out for this. I know you can always use money in Paris. And then how about a celebration dinner tonight, some place where they have marvelous French cooking?”

Cynthia laughed. “I can do better than that, I’ve got an invitation for you, instead. We’re both invited to a really American meal. Please, do you like corned beef hash?”

CHAPTER 3

Brittany

COLD-IN-THE-HEAD

Nancy’s rapid, fluent French gave directions to the small, sabot shod boy who dragged behind him a blue painted hand cart. Then she turned to bestow an additional hug on the waiting Cynthia.

“Oh, but it is grand to see you. And how brown you will get here! Come along. François’ll bring your luggage in his perambulator.”

Cynthia drew a deep whiff of the ocean scented air. “Ouff! ’S nice to get on solid ground again. I feel inches deep in train dirt and trolley dust. How sweet the air smells, Nancy.”

“You’ll see the broad Atlantic in a moment or two, just over that way a few blocks. We have to walk about a half mile to the bathing beach, but it’s a beauty when you get there.”

Cynthia gave a little skip of delight. “How’s your especially nice parent?” she asked.

“She’s always lovely. At the moment she’s in a seventh heaven, having donned a disreputable paint-smeared smock, stuck an old straw hat on her head, and is painting ocean foam and wet rocks, laying the color on the canvas with a trowel! She’s awfully glad to be free of the illustration business for a time, if you ask me. But you’ll see her soon. She gets hungry and comes home to meals.” Nancy babbled on and Cynthia had a chance to see how brown and strong she looked, how much good the summer in this tiny provincial town was doing her.

“We turn here, to the right. This, ladieeze and gen’lemen, is the main and principal street of Le Conquet, the most wester-r-r-n town in all France. Sweet, isn’t it, Cindy?”

It was, Cynthia admitted, adorable. Old and gray and cobblepaved, with a tiny, one-pedestrian sidewalk along one wall, and with little two- and three-story houses of old, pearly-gray stone whose tiny windows opened intimately close to the street, as did the heavy wooden doors. Green lichened roofs sloped steeply, and there were red geraniums blooming in open windows between blowing red and green checked curtains, to give color to the mellow softness of the ancient stone.

“Our American hero, Mr. Jones, used to put in here, they say,” remarked Nancy casually.

“What Mr. Jones?” asked Cynthia, then at Nancy’s deepening dimple, always an index to her mood, suspected a trap. “Who was Mr. Jones?”

“Why surely you remember John Jones, of the U. S. Navy? No? ... Not Mr. John Paul Jones?”

“Beast!” laughed Cynthia, then “Tell me some more.”

“Well, as you know, this is the Department of Finisterre, Lands End, and is the farthest west of all western provinces. Some centuries ago, dunno how many, but not long, it belonged to England and the people here are closer to the southwest-of-England type than you could imagine.”

They turned a corner, past a wide lipped stone well where a woman dipped water in a huge, creamy-toned pitcher. Cynthia murmured, “Wait till I can get to my sketch book!” and Nancy nodded understandingly.

“Then the French got it back,” she continued, “and perhaps the English again after that. Anyway the English burnt it a couple of times, though there were still some English families living here, but spared the houses in which they lived. That’s why there are still some very old places, in spite of the conquerors. Here’s the quay. You must get out your canvas sneakers, these cobbles are death on good leather shoes. Wooden sabots are best, though I’ve never tried ’em.”

The tiny hotel smelled pleasantly of soap and good Breton cooking. One went steeply up two flights of stairs to a narrow hall and turned into a small, whitewashed room with a dresser, a wash stand and a white covered bed. The single window overlooked the long stretch of quay and the tidal river, very low now and turning to marvelous lavender in the sunset light.

“My room is next door, and mother’s beyond that. Here are your things. I brought you the longest way so you could see the town—Goodness, you aren’t catching a cold are you?”

Cynthia sneezed again. “I hope not. But a small child in the train from Paris had frightful snuffles, right in my own compartment, and it was sort of drafty on the trolley from Brest.”

Promising to hurry, she closed the door and went to the window to hang out, gazing. Wooden shoes clattered merrily on the cobbles of the quay, and along the distant dunes, purpling with dusk, smoke rose from the smouldering potash fires where, Nancy had said, the thrifty Bretons burned seaweed for fertilizer.

She was pleasantly weary and very hungry. All last night she had been traveling, more than half the width of France from Paris to Brest. Uncle Leslie had sailed from Brest after the Armistice, she remembered, and its steep streets and ancient houses, built on half a dozen different levels, had fascinated her during the hours she had to wait for her trolley to Le Conquet.

It had been surprisingly hard to leave Paris. That city had changed for her, almost overnight. She could have stayed on there, almost happily, doing paintings and more paintings, digging herself in. Almost happily, but not quite. After all, she could have done that in New York. And what was the use of keeping on with a thing, once you had learned you could really do it, once you had met it and conquered it? While she was over here it was up to her to travel, learn, experiment, grow.

And here, right outside the window was her first view of a real French village. How different from Paris, how quaint and sweet and clean—and oh, how paintable it was going to be. No wonder Nancy’s famous artist mother planned to spend her summer here. Perhaps Mrs. Brewster would be able to tell her how to find a model for the next cover, the Christmas number of Little One’s Magazine. Cynthia wanted to paint a little dark eyed Breton girl or boy, in wooden shoes and quaint cap for that December number.

Goodness, there was the dinner gong! Cynthia pulled in her head just in time to face Nancy at the door. “Mother just came up stairs. Want to come say hello?”

Cynthia sneezed and fumbled in her suitcase for a clean handkerchief. “Just a moment, Nan. I’ve been so busy just looking that I haven’t had time to get washed or combed. Now where did I put those hankies? Pour out the water, will you honey? So I can wash. Oh ... darling Mrs. Brewster!”

Nancy’s mother, as pretty as ever, tanned from sea bathing, seemed hardly older than her daughter. “We’re so glad to have you here, my child. I want to hear all about your covers, and see what you’ve been doing. Nancy tells me you’ve already completed one painting, in Paris—Here’s the dining room, and this is our table.”

There were several painters and two writers among the jolly little crowd at the Hotel Des Poissons. Cynthia got a tremendous thrill out of having these older people, all professional craftsmen of proved ability, regard her with respect and as an artist already “arrived.” Yet she was, after all, also a professional, traveling, actually seeing the world on what she earned with her brush and pencil. When she stopped to think about that, Cynthia always felt like a fairy-tale-princess who has rubbed the magic ring. But generally she was too busy to think about it.

The next morning Nancy took her to explore the little town, not a long tour, for there were not six streets in the whole place. The ancient sturdy houses, facing the sea for half a dozen centuries seemed to grow from the very rock on which they were built. Below the hotel one crossed a bridge, at high water, or walked on a raised path across the sands, at low tide, to a long sandy beach bordered with dunes and tall waving grasses, very white and flat and clean.

Cynthia surveyed the clear stretch of deserted sand, and Nancy’s brief little bathing suit with a longing eye. “I won’t go swimming for a day or two, I guess,” she decided. “This cold doesn’t seem to get any better and I’d rather not risk it.” She wondered if she were being old-maid fussy about herself.

Breakfast was a delightfully informal meal, at almost any hour of the morning, and in the inn parlor, not the dining room. Here the ceiling quivered with reflections from the sunspangled river.

On the second morning Nancy brought to breakfast a large, mysterious bag, and when she had received her huge bowl of café au lait, weak coffee made with milk, she opened the paper bag and dumped a handful of what appeared to be rolled oats, raw, into her bowl.

“What on earth is that?” asked Cynthia.

“That’s my breakfast food, want to try some?”

Cynthia shook her head, “Goodness no. But where can you get breakfast food, American style, in a paper bag, in a French village?”

“Feed store,” mumbled Nancy around her large spoonful. “It’s just chicken feed. Bran. I get so hungry by noon, with these continental breakfasts.”

“How about an egg?” was Cynthia’s suggestion. “Soft boiled.”

“Try and get it.” Nancy’s tone was amused.

Cynthia struggled with the hard-to pronounce oeuf. Shortly it came, all alone on a small dish. It was hot, so it must have been in hot water. But when she broke it ... “Ugh! It’s completely raw!”

“They simply won’t boil it any longer, unless you want a twenty minute egg, like a rock,” explained Nancy. “It’s one of the unsolved mysteries of the French cuisine. You’ll come to chicken-feed yet!”

Meanwhile the time was passing. Cynthia had arrived on a Thursday, Sunday had rolled round, her Christmas cover must go off to Paris this week, and she seemed no nearer it than the week before. In fact, so far, she hadn’t seen any children that looked paintable.

“They are pretty enough,” she mourned, at breakfast on Sunday. “But it’s merely a matter of color with them. I haven’t seen a single child that I thought would make a good poster cover.”

Mrs. Brewster nodded. “I know. But some of the old people are marvelous. There are no better types for models of old people in all of France.”

“But not for the Christmas cover of a children’s magazine. Unless ... there is a thought, I give them a Breton Santa Claus.”

“No whiskers on ’em here.” Nancy was most discouraging. “What have you to suggest, Mother?”

“Hark, there’s the church bell. I suggest that you two hurry into your best bonnets and shawls and go to church. All the village will be there and you will have a good chance to look them over. Then if you find what you want I’ll ask Madame, our patronne, to introduce us. Hurry now!”

It was a splendid idea, Cynthia admitted, as she followed Nancy into the little stone church. Surely every good Breton inhabitant of Le Conquet was present, the women in wide skirts trimmed with bands of black velvet, with full sleeves, and tight black bodices setting off the lace-trimmed white aprons, the frosty white caps of Breton lace and the wide lace collars. Here at least, all the lovely quaintness of medieval France had not gone down before the stupid uniform of store-bought gingham dresses.

The men were no less picturesque, with their low crowned wide brimmed hats, the shining silver buttons on their short, black velvet coats. And each child was a miniature replica of its parents, with the exception of the caps which mark the married women.

The small bleak church was warmed to light by the rustle of many garments, by the soft glow of candles and Cynthia was enchanted by the little ship-models that swung from the hand hewn rafters, all of them as perfect as skill and loving care could make them.

“They are thank offerings for the safe return of the ships they represent,” Nancy whispered to her. “Oh look, Cindy; isn’t she a darling?” Her elbow nudged for Cynthia’s attention.

The minute Cynthia saw her, her artist’s eye registered her as the one model for that Christmas cover. Such pansy-brown eyes, such soft curls around the little pink-cheeked face, such a dimpled round chin above the starched white collar and the tight little bodice, like a small child playing at grown-up.

Cynthia nodded her approval of Nancy’s choice. “How nice,” she thought, “to be with artists again. Oh, I wish they could be with me all over France,” remembering her loneliness in Paris.

After the service they edged their way toward the door, Cynthia keeping the child in sight all the way. The little girl’s mother, who walked behind her, was a larger edition of the same type and must have been lovely when she was young, but was now bent and weary eyed, like so many of the hard working Breton peasants.

Nancy’s eyes had been roving the church. Now she gave Cynthia a reassuring nod. “Wait for me outside,” she commanded and wriggled away through the crowd. Cynthia, who was taller than most of the villagers, saw her stop at last before a woman in black and wearing a hat. Their own patronne from the hotel, very much in her Sunday best. Nancy waved to Cynthia, then the two disappeared, blotted out by the congregation.

Five minutes later she joined Cynthia in the little square above the fountain. “It’s all right,” she reported triumphantly. “We identified your model and her mother, and Madame says she will ask her about posing.”

That was fine. Cynthia already saw her cover, painted, delivered, printed, and exhibited on every Christmas news stand in New York. She drew a breath of relief.

They strolled back toward the hotel and the pleasant smell of Sunday dinner, the crowd slowly trickling away behind them. The little bakery was already doing a brisk business, for many of these small shops opened as soon as the church was out. Cynthia’s eyes caught a new poster on the bakery wall, a single sheet of vivid lemon yellow with blue and red type, such a bright patch of color in the pearly gray street that she hauled Nancy along to look at it.

“Well ...” after a minute of Nancy’s silent contemplation. “What does it say, stupid? Can’t you read out loud, the way you were taught?”

Nancy chuckled. “Sorry, I forgot. Well, ‘Hypnotiste’ means ‘Hypnotist.’”

“I gathered as much as that. What comes after it?”

“‘World renowned Professor Reynaldo.’ That sounds Spanish but he says he’s from Paris—‘Parisien’—will be here on Tuesday evening to give a demonstration of his stupendous and altogether unexplainable power of the human eye,” Nancy translated loosely. “It also says his demonstration will be held in the meat market. ... I suppose that’s the biggest room they have, except the church, and that admission will be one and two francs. Standing room fifty centimes. Poor thing, he can’t make much of a living out of that.”

“Let’s go,” suggested Cynthia.

“Eh? ... Well ... yes.” Then as the idea struck her. “I think it would be fun. Maybe mother would like to go. Let’s ask her now.”

Mrs. Brewster was amused at the idea and quite willing they should go, but refused to be a third of the party. “Not if it’s to be held in the meat market. I never could stand the odor of so many sides of beef and mutton. But you children go along. I’m sure you will find it an amusing cross section of the peasant’s amusement. I believe they have never had a hypnotist here before.”

But Cynthia very nearly didn’t get to the entertainment after all. For on Sunday afternoon she went swimming with Nancy. It was an hour or two after dinner, the warmest part of the day when the girls took their bathing suits and crossed the little path across the tidal river. The way straggled along the top of a high, wind-torn meadow where coarse grasses tangled about the feet and where, on the rocks below, the sea piled, churning among the crevices. But the further side of this little peninsula was the bathing beach, quite wild and deserted, and one could choose any of a hundred grass-grown sand dunes for a dressing room.

Nancy had raced on ahead, and Cynthia sneezed twice, and wondered if she ought to go for this swim, after all. She wrestled with her conscience for a bit ... and conscience lost.

It was a beautiful swim, but about midnight Cynthia awoke with such a sore throat she could scarcely whisper. “Oh, darn!” she murmured feverishly. “What a bother! I do hope I’m not going to be sick!”

She lay for a bit thinking about that, then rapped gently beside her bed. She heard Nancy’s springs creak, heard her mutter something sleepily, and in a moment the light of Nancy’s candle appeared beneath the crack of the door. The crack widened and a sleepy voice asked, “Did you rap, honey? Oh, you poor thing! Cynthia, you are a wreck!”

Mrs. Brewster was called immediately and then Madame. Together they applied a hot, oily cloth to Cynthia’s throbbing throat, a funny aluminum hot-water bottle to her feet, and gave her a dose of something else, equally unpleasant and equally hot. Then she was given something to breathe on a handkerchief ... Cynthia muttered that it nearly blew off the top of her head, but it did miraculously clear her nose for its original purpose of breathing.

Next day she felt heaps and heaps better and protested that she could easily get up. But she was kept in bed till noon and then allowed out only for a short stroll in the sunshine, equipped with a handkerchief soaked in the breathing stuff. “But no more bathing till you are quite over this,” was the stern order of Nancy’s mother.

“Yes’m,” murmured Cynthia meekly, ashamed to have given them all such a fright.

There was, however, a final straw. At dinner that night Madame reported that she had seen the mother of the little girl, Leonie her name was, and that the woman refused to let the child pose for her portrait.

“But how silly,” stammered Cynthia. “What is the matter? I’ll pay for her time of course.”

“It’s not that,” Mrs. Brewster explained from Madame’s conversation. “But they are rather afraid of artists. The few who come here paint only the sea and the dunes. They aren’t accustomed to the idea of artists’ models, not even for portraits. This woman seems unusually simple and I suppose the word ‘posing’ made her think of wicked Paris! I’m sorry, for I think I might have persuaded her. Madame probably didn’t know how to go about it tactfully. ... If the woman could have met you. ... But aren’t there others you can get? I’m sure there must be.”

So that Christmas cover had gone to smash, too! It would be hard to pick out another child, after having seen Leonie. Perhaps she’d have another opportunity to see the villagers at the meeting on Tuesday evening.

Mrs. Brewster again gave her reluctant, though amused, consent. “If you’ll take a fresh handkerchief with some of that Breathex on it. ...”

“Three of ’em,” promised Cynthia and Nancy together.

“... And come straight home if you find you’re in a draft, or if you start to sneeze.”

“We will,” came the chorus.

Mrs. Brewster laughed. “All right. And I may sound fussy, but a tiny village in a foreign country is no place for one to get ill. Now run along and get ready for your show.”

They followed the crowd and the clomp of wooden shoes to the meat market at the center of the town. Here, in the big hall, benches—rough boards on trestles—had been arranged and the Professor himself stood at the improvised ticket window.

“Shall we be extravagant and take a two-franc ticket? Then we can sit in the front row,” suggested Nancy.

“Let’s,” urged Cynthia. “What fun to have eight cents buy so much luxury.”

The first two rows were very de luxe; benches with backs, but so hard and narrow that Cynthia was glad they had brought their coats for cushions. The children, giggling and whispering, somewhat awestruck by the promised entertainment, crowded into the seats behind them, and in the front rows sat the old ladies, some even with their knitting, very straight and stiff and impressive. There was a scuffle of sabots on the stone floor and outside a tied sheep baa-a-a-ed plaintively.

Everyone peered and craned and turned heads to see the two American mademoiselles, and discussed them in friendly fashion, but quite openly. Cynthia’s bright beret and red coat, her gray eyes and dark curls, her shoes, her silk stockings, the ring on her finger, were argued and debated ... and relayed by Nancy in a choked murmur.

“You are rich, since you wear a gold ring with a greenglass stone in it. Someone suggests that you are married, also because of the ring, but it seems Madame at the hotel has reported that you are still a ‘Mees,’ judging by your letters. Oh, here is our professor!”

M’sieu Reynaldo, who had been at once ticket taker and dispenser, usher, and frightener-away of small boys who would press their snubby noses against the windows, at last barred the doors and strode proudly up the center, and only, aisle. The stage was a rough platform on saw-horses, beneath the light of a half dozen dim, swinging lanterns, and was but a few feet from the de luxe seats occupied by Cynthia and Nancy.

“Look, Nancy; there’s my lost model, Leonie. See, there at the end. Isn’t she a darling!”

“Sh-h,” Nancy nudged her. “He’s going to begin.”

The professor’s performance began with a short talk on hypnotism, its great antiquity, its meaning, and mostly of how wonderful he was at that ancient art. How, with the supreme power of his eye and a few passes of his hands—somewhat soiled hands they were—he could control his subjects and command them, thereafter to do his bidding.

“I don’t believe it,” murmured Cynthia.

“Wait and see,” muttered Nancy.

“I must have absolute quiet here, during my demonstrations,” frowned the great Reynaldo. He was a small, slender-boned man in a soiled velvet jacket, and the jetty hair, the low brows, the wide cheekbones of the typical lower class Parisien—an amusing contrast to the bigger, blonder, slow-moving Breton audience.

He asked first for two volunteers from the audience. After considerable shy shuffling of feet and chattering insistence on the part of their feminine escorts, two boys were shoved forward, down the aisle. Laughing, red with embarrassment, the clumsy young fishermen mounted the stage, then half numb with stage fright awaited the next move.

A chorus of murmured advice came from the interested and neighborly audience.

“Silence!” ordered the professor, with a flash of his Paris-black eyes.

Then before the eyes of each volunteer he made passes with his hand, gave a low murmured command, and first one, then the other became glassy eyed and appeared to go into a waking sleep, there on the stage. The hall was intensely still, hardly a foot stirred or a skirt rustled.

Cynthia choked in her handkerchief. “Oh, dear,” she thought. “I believe I’m going to sneeze, and how shall we ever get out of here!” But the scent on her handkerchief, though it nearly strangled her, did put a halt to the sneeze.

“You are now asleep,” the Professor told his subjects. “You will do exactly as I say. Lie down and roll over.”

The two young men lay down on the platform and rolled over. There was a murmur of awe from the onlookers.

“Now this is a stairway and you are climbing up it,” continued the orders. “Now open this door,” where there was no door. “It is cold and windy out and the rain beats on your faces as you open it.” The two staggered back, arms over eyes as though they had indeed opened a real door on a blast of wind and rain.

Cynthia was getting a little bored with this. It seemed so onesided, so unsporting. The audience tittered, but the boys were such simple country lads it seemed unfair they should be made a laughing stock like this. She didn’t like that oily little man with his velvet coat and his soiled hands. “I wish he’d stop,” she thought.

The exhibition continued with various orders. The subjects were given water to taste, an empty glass to smell, but the Professor directed that they smell or taste whatever he dictated, and their faces amusingly registered disgust or delight or surprise. Yes, they were funny, but Cynthia felt uncomfortable and looked back over her shoulder toward the bolted door. She wished she hadn’t come.

Only once did the little professor nearly lose his subjects. During a tense and silent moment the sheep in the yard uttered a prolonged “Ba-a-ah!” The audience giggled hysterically and one of the young men began to come to himself again, looked around in a bewildered fashion and walked to the edge of the platform.

The Professor waved his hands, snapped his fingers. “Go, it is finished,” he commanded.

The two subjects blinked awake. If they had been caught abroad in their nightshirts they could not have looked more red and sheepish.

After that the renowned Reynaldo attempted to hypnotize a small dog, a little fox terrier that belonged to someone in the audience. The effort was hardly a success, for the fox terrier didn’t seem to realize he was a subject for the professor’s art. But the audience, with the remembrance of the former demonstration, was properly impressed and after a bit the terrier was allowed to go, barking his joy at the release, unharmed to his master.

Again the Paris Professor called for volunteers, asking this time for two little girls as he had already demonstrated his power over grown men. The children on the benches behind Cynthia and Nancy giggled and nudged, “You go ... no, you go ... Let M’rie go ... Let Leonie ...” till five had been suggested and the professor, making his choice, called two to the stage.

“Oh, there goes my little model,” murmured Cynthia, really distressed. “Can’t we stop her, Nancy?”

Nancy shook her head, her eyes on the stage. “I don’t know how we could. After all, the professor is French and we are just outsiders. Better let them handle it themselves.”

Cynthia subsided meekly but kept an eye on the little Leonie. What a lovely pose ... and that one ... and the next. Why the child was a born model, a picture in herself!

She was also excellent material for the hypnotist, for she immediately obeyed his orders, going to sleep bolt upright in her chair before the professor’s waving, commanding hands. The other little girl, older and of stouter stuff, though not so easy a victim was also finally put to sleep. To Cynthia’s relief Reynaldo used more discretion in this case and satisfied his audience by having the children do a little dance, by having them appear to smell a rose when he gave them an onion, seem to taste something sour when he gave them a bonbon.

Then he asked if either of the girls were musical. Someone in the audience volunteered that Marie could sing but that Leonie could not sing a note. He then commanded Leonie to come forward and perform for them. “Sing correctly,” he ordered, and named a little nursery tune known to all French children.

The child really had a very pretty voice and performed with considerable credit. Also her friends seemed to think it marvelous that she could sing at all. But Cynthia, stifling a sneeze in her handkerchief, tapped a restless foot on the stone floor.

Good, it was going to end! Monsieur Reynaldo had commanded with a sharp clap of his hand beside the ear of each child, that his subjects come awake. M’rie blinked her china blue eyes, smiled timorously and clattered down the steps to join her friends.

But Leonie was a different matter. As Cynthia, taking a deep breath of her “Breathex” soaked handkerchief, watched with some interest, then growing apprehension, it seemed that the Professor also was becoming concerned.

To cover his own confusion, he ordered her to get up, to walk across the stage, to do various things, all of which she performed with her former obedience. But when he again made passes before her eyes, then, in a low tone to cover possible failure, again ordered her to waken, she remained as soundly, as blank-eyed asleep as before. The audience was apparently undisturbed, and seemed to take all this as part of the performance.

“I’m worried,” Cynthia confided to Nancy through the muffling folds of her handkerchief. “Oh, but this stuff is strong.” Her eyes were streaming with tears, but so far she had managed to keep back that sneeze.

“Worried?” Nancy turned big eyes on Cynthia. “Do you mean to say ...”

“I don’t think he can get that child out of that trance. I wonder ...”

Cynthia turned to look around the audience. They too were beginning, unconsciously, to reflect the professor’s concern. Quietly, three times now, he had given his command, Cynthia’s ears were abnormally keen, in spite of the cold.

She glanced back again at the stage, then decided what she would do. Evading Nancy she slipped out of her seat, past the two old ladies who sat on the aisle. It was just a step to the stage, a step or two across it. Leonie’s blank stare did not turn to follow her, but Cynthia knew that she had the attention of every other soul in the house.

She smiled briefly at the bewildered professor and crossed to the child. From her pocket she drew a clean handkerchief soaked with the over-powering scent of “Breathex.”

“I wonder,” Cynthia spoke in English in the hope that the professor, being from Paris, knew a little of that tongue, “if the petite enfant would like to smell this.” And before the hypnotist could protest, had clapped the handkerchief to Leonie’s little snub nose.

It was like a double dose of smelling salts. The American makers would have been proud of their preparation, though perhaps no such strange application of it had ever been suggested to them.

Leonie choked, coughed, strangled a moment. But the blank left her eyes and she struggled to escape the handkerchief. Bewildered, for a moment she gazed at Cynthia, then smiled shyly in a perfectly human, understanding fashion.

Tactfully Cynthia withdrew. “Merci, Professor,” she murmured and backed down the steps.

She heard little of what followed. The Professor’s florid explanation of this occurrence, of the American’s interference with his demonstration, but his willingness to let that pass ... and so on and so on. The audience murmured polite amazement, stared at Cynthia, clapped at the end of Reynaldo’s speech, and began to rise from their benches. The door swung open into the sweet, starlit night.

“Well ...!” stated Nancy. “You certainly distinguished yourself. Gosh, but that was a close call for Leonie. Wonder what would have happened ...”

Cynthia shook her head. “But I knew something must happen if she got a whiff of this. It would have pulled a mummy back to life. Ah, here’s Leonie.”

The child’s mother had appeared beside her, holding her hand. She at least was not unaware that the American Mees had done something, though she wasn’t quite sure what, for her petite.

“Thank you,” she murmured in shy, halting English; then, that proving to be all she knew, she broke into fluid French which almost stumped Nancy to translate.

“She asks,” interpreted Miss Brewster, “if there is anything she can do for the pretty American ... make a bow, Cindy ... She says she is very grateful to you and that it was very naughty for her Leonie to go up on the stage like that, before all the village. I’ve told her that we will come tomorrow to pay our respects to Leonie’s household. We’ll bring Mother along, too. That all sounds sufficiently formal.”

They streamed out into the fan of light across the cobbled road. The white caps and dark dresses of the audience melted behind them into darkness. The night was sweet and warm and there was a sound of the sea on the rocks, far off.

“Good night,” called Cynthia. “Good night!” then slipped her hand into Nancy’s arm.

“There,” said Nancy, “is your Christmas cover, my dear, and in such a funny way.”

“Aitchoo!” sneezed Cynthia in eloquent reply.

CHAPTER 4

Mont St. Michel

“LITTLE MISS FIX-IT”

Nancy’s mother, who as a young art student had lived in France, knew all the places that Cynthia, as a younger art student, ought to see and go.

“Don’t,” she told Cynthia, “despise the well-worn routes just because they are well-worn. Later on you can go to the out of the way places too. But you need the talked-about places as a basis for comparison, just as you need to know black and white in order to paint color.”

The idea interested Cynthia. “What do you call the well-worn places.”

“Mother means those that are full of tourists and trippers,” explained Nancy.

“Yes, of course,” said Mrs. Brewster, “Just the sort of places you saw in Paris. The Louvre, the tomb of Napoleon, Montmartre, the Arc de Triomphe. You don’t need to rush through them, Baedecker in hand—though a guidebook is always useful—like the American couple out of Punch. ‘You see the outside Marthy, and I’ll see the inside, and we’ll cut the time in half.’”

Cynthia laughed. She knew those tourists, so intent on gathering data to relate at home that they were blind to real beauty, to all the little local color and pleasant customs of the people. “But besides Paris, what would you suggest?”

“Well, there’s Carcassonne, of course.”

“Oh yes!” agreed Cynthia. Carcassonne had been on her list too.

“Then I think you should see a bit of the Basque country. It’s lovely, though it has become a little self-conscious lately, with so many books being written about it.”

Nancy had a suggestion here. “Don’t you think Cynthia would adore Mouleon Soule?” And Mrs. Brewster, agreeing, had promised a letter of introduction to an old Basque artist there. “And that will be real local color too. Then there’s Rome and Venice and Florence ...”

Cynthia shook her head. Not much chance of her getting to Italy, not unless the reward for capturing Goncourt, on the ship coming over, should materialize. “Tell me some places near here. Normandy, Brittany.”

“Mont St. Michel!” cried Nancy.

Mrs. Brewster nodded. “I wonder ...” she began.

Nancy took her up. “If we couldn’t go too?”

“Oh that would be wonderful!” cried Cynthia. And so the matter was arranged.

Mont St. Michel was famous for four things; its tides and the island with its mile long causeway to land, its fortress abbey, and omelets. Nature was responsible for the first two, Normandy abbots and the wealth which William of Normandy had filched from England, for the second, and Madame Poulard now dead, but still surviving in her reputation, for the third.

It was to partake of the third that Cynthia was seated, on the evening of her first day at Mont St. Michel, before a red checked cloth covered table in the Hotel Tete D’or. It was a distracting scent. The great arched room with ceiling darkened by the smoke of many fires, the enormous fireplace under the great cowled chimney, and the fascinating process of mixing that omelet which Madame Poulard had made famous among gourmets all the world over. And for a further distraction there was the couple at the corner table; the man so dark and slim and ... well, interesting looking, the girl so pretty, and so angry. Cynthia’s attention was doubly held, by the girl’s prettiness and by her anger.

Nancy’s tug at her sleeve pulled Cynthia’s attention back to the omelet making. This was a ceremony, a rite in itself that people came from all over the world to see. A huge bowl of sweet butter, eggs, and the long handled iron skillet held in Madam’s skillful hand. From the butter she sliced a great golden gob, dumped it into the pan and held it over the small fire in the big fireplace.

“I knew the original Madam Poulard,” Mrs. Brewster was saying. “She and her husband were the handsomest couple in Normandy, or so it was said. Look ... the eggs go in now.”

The little cook, plump and trim in her black dress and neat white apron poured the golden mass into the hot butter, stirred it slowly with a long handled spoon.

“Funny to think how small a thing, like an omelet, can make a place famous,” mused Cynthia.

“Oh, but she made it an art. Like your child portraits, Cynthia,” said Mrs. Brewster.

A delicious smell, wood smoke, butter, the omelet. Cynthia grew ravenous just watching the process. In another moment it would be ready for them. And again her attention sought the couple at the further table. The man looked almost French, thin and wiry and intense, the girl had buttercup hair that gleamed in the lamplight, and slim, capable hands with which she gestured as she talked.

The finished omelet was served piping hot upon a plate warmed before the fire. When Cynthia had finished the last delicious morsel she looked up again. The party of two had become three by the addition of an older man, obviously the father of the girl.

“I wonder if they’re engaged,” said Cynthia turning the little emerald on her own slim finger.

“Who’s engaged, Cyn?” asked Nancy. “Listen honey, try the raspberries, with sour cream, they’re delicious.” But then Nancy’s back was toward the interesting couple so she might be excused for a lack of interest. Mrs. Brewster caught Cynthia’s eye and smiled.

“The man looks like a Basque,” she said. “But I think the girl is American. I saw them in our hotel this afternoon.”

The Brewsters, who with Cynthia had come the short but complicated trip from Brittany that morning, planned now to spend several days at Mont St. Michel. After that Cynthia was reconciled to traveling alone again. Meanwhile she and Nancy could paint and explore the abbey fortress and talk Academy gossip, there wouldn’t be such another chance till Cynthia got back to New York.

Exploration got under way immediately after breakfast the next morning. Nancy with her mother’s sketch box, Cynthia with the sketching stool accompanied Mrs. Brewster up the steep cobbled street of the tiny village.

“Just as far as half way up the hill,” directed Mrs. Brewster. “There’s a small garden of cabbages there that takes on the most heavenly color in the sunlight. That is if the man has planted cabbages this year.”

The man had, and they were indeed heavenly. Cynthia sucked in her breath at the beauty of the color. One had not guessed that mere cabbages could be so decorative.

Below them stretched stairs and more stairs of the dark purplish brown stone of the island, all the long, steep, curving way up which they had come. Slowly the stairway had widened, houses dropped away and now, level with the eye, rose the second and third stories of the fortress-like dwellings that fringed the town. Chimneys incredibly thick threw long morning shadows of rich blue on salmon pink walls and grey tiled roofs. Round towers lent piquant variety to the outlines and the incongruity of a bedquilt stuffed through the window of a beetling fortress, to air above a frowning keep, made Cynthia’s fingers tingle for paper and pencil with which to note it all down. Below the windows, tiny gardens—something pinkish, something ochre—Cynthia with eyes half closed to shut out shapes of things saw only color where some thrifty Normandy farmer had planted provender for the coming winter. And cabbages, so green they were almost blue, jewel vivid, jewel bright. Cynthia nodded. Tomorrow she would bring her paint box.

“My stool, Cynthia dear.” Amusedly Mrs. Brewster broke in on her reverie. “I’ll be here for two hours at least. Run along and don’t fall off any parapets or into any oubliettes.”

“What’s an oubliette?” asked Cynthia racing upward beside Nancy.

“It’s a ‘forgettery,’” explained Nancy, “and if that doesn’t mean anything to you, my child, it’s an extremely graphic name for the trap-door, underground dungeons that they used to drop you into if you offended a king or an abbot. Monte Cristo stuff, you know. I believe this place is simply riddled with ’em.”

“Ugh! Horrid people, kings and abbots!”

“Ah, but they could build. Look up, honey!”

Above now, far above them, rose the peaks and pinnacles of this fairy-tale place. Below them the whole island rose like a hand from the sea, joined to the mainland by only the single mile-long causeway. Ringed about the finger’s root were the far off houses, fronting the sea, backs to the land. And surmounting the whole, like a thimble atop the finger, the abbey, rising, ever rising in the still clear air to the final peak of all, the glittering image of Saint Michel de la mer du peril; of the perilous sea. The Archangel, it seemed, loved heights. From the tip of the tower that crowned his abbey, wings of gold outspread, sword uplifted, his mailed foot crushed the devil who crawled beneath, and atop one foot perched the golden cock, symbol of eternal vigilance.

Cynthia, gazing skyward murmured, “Lovely!”

“Marvelous!” whispered Nancy looking seaward. The sands of St. Michel, those treacherous sands through which the tide can rip and roar in minutes, seconds almost, shone far below them now, peacefully dry, almost lavender in the sun, creating a false horizon for the fringe of little houses along the shore.

“Let’s get a guide,” suggested Nancy turning back. “I detest them as a rule. But this place is a perfect labyrinth, and besides you can pick up so much information the guide books don’t give you.”

At the entrance gate, where a few francs bought admittance, they found that a group would start through the abbey in about twenty minutes. Preferring to wait outside they braced themselves against the wall where the sun was pleasantly warm and watched their fellow tourists assemble.

A little old lady and her husband, both very winded from the long climb. “From Ioway,” Cynthia bet Nancy in a whisper. “And on their wedding anniversary trip.”

“Heads you win, tails I lose,” said Nancy scornfully. “But these are Britishers, I’ll bet my new tube of Prussian blue.”

Sober hats set high on the head, bright complexions, and, as they drew nearer up the stair, broad A’s and clipped G’s proved Nancy to be right. Next three French sisters in black and white, from some religious order.

“Probably from a convent in Canada,” hazarded Nancy, listening to their French. “They come on holiday to visit the churches in France. Mother and I have crossed with groups of them several times; they are always so picturesque and so jolly. And here’s a pretty girl for your sketch book, Cyn.”

It was the girl from the restaurant, the girl with the buttercup hair. And her young man. The girl seemed to half recognize Cynthia, for she gave a little tremulous smile, then turned abruptly away as though she wasn’t sure whether they had met or not.

“Mesdames et Messieurs ...” began the guide in shrill tones and, fumbling with an enormous bunch of keys, unlocked the great door to the abbey. For the next hour he led them through cloisters twelve hundred feet above the ocean, through the refectory and the ancient church, through banqueting halls in which kings and princes had feasted. “They say Harold the Saxon was a guest and a prisoner here of William of Normandy before William became the Conqueror,” translated Nancy.

Beyond her the young man also translated for the benefit of the girl with him. Between them Cynthia managed to pick up most of the guide’s information. They were in the banqueting hall, that long gray drafty hall with its many pillars, and Cynthia, gazing about her, tried to transform it to the way it must have been when Harold was the unwilling guest. A place of flaring torches, lords and ladies in silks and velvets, in trailing veils and sky-pointing hennins, lifting their heavy trains from the rushes that covered the floor. There would be tapestries, rippling along the walls as the drafts caught them, painted ceilings that had long ago faded to gray and stone color, minstrels to make music, great dogs to lie about on the rush-strewn floor, and the delicious scent of long forgotten foods from those great fireplaces in the kitchens beyond. Yes, the far off times must have been fun too. She wished she had been here then.

But the oubliettes changed her opinion on that. Only a few of them, so the guide said, now remained open to the public. The others, cut down through the solid rock, lay far, far below, damp, almost airless, foul with rats and crawling things.

“And if the abbot or the king wanted you out of the way, you lived for years down there,” said Nancy.

One, not far below the dining hall, was a tiny place, dark, airless, with scarcely room to lie or sit or stand upright.

“Do you mean to say,” asked Cynthia, “that those people up above could dance and sing and ... and enjoy themselves with all those prisoners down below them?”

The group had gone on a way; but Cynthia, lingering behind to explore, had jumped down into the oubliette to see just what kind of a place it really was. She spoke from the floor, some distance below Nancy’s neat brown oxfords.

Nancy shrugged. “That’s the middle ages, darling.”

Cynthia reached up. “Give me a hand, Nancy. I want to get out of here. Ugh ...” once on the floor beside the other, “I hate this place, it’s haunted by all those horrible things they used to do.”

Nancy looked at her queerly. “Not see any more? All right. I’m willing,” and five minutes later they stood once more before the great western entrance looking out over the sands and the town below.

“Ou ... uf!” Cynthia drew a great breath of the free air. “I’d go off my nut if we stayed in there much longer. It’s beautiful, but gosh, it was cruel. Let’s go somewhere and pick daisies and get the smell of those forgetteries out of our noses. C’mon, Nannie.” And grabbing Nancy’s wrist she hauled her headlong down the stairs towards the town below.

As they raced past, Mrs. Brewster was still absorbed in her cabbages and did not even look up. The steps narrowed, they came to the block-long village with its dark, tiny windowed houses where were displayed all the usual tricks to catch the tourist trade.

“Daisies!” cried Cynthia. “Where can we get daisies?” and looked about her. Steep cobbled streets, the sands ahead.

“Let’s stop and get us a citronade, and I’ll ask,” suggested the diplomatic Nancy. While they sipped the sweet warmish drink from thick tumblers she chattered with the waitress. “It’s all right,” she reported. “There are pretty flowers for you to pick, my child. Oh, there’s your blonde friend’s boy friend, and all alone.”

Cynthia had noticed him too, furiously striding down the steep street. Where was the buttercup girl? “They were quarreling last night,” she said, watching the nervous wiry back as it turned the lower corner of the street, entered the hotel. “And then her father came in. She didn’t seem very happy today either.”

“Little Miss Fix-it,” teased Nancy. “What’s it to you? Come on now, we’ll go hunt daisies.”

At the very foot of the street where, at high tide the seas must wash, where boats lay, small and deserted on the yellow sand, footprints led along the base of the cliff. Here, rounding the turn, the wind blew freshly from off the coasts of England, small crabs scuttled to shelter as they passed and far far above them Saint Michel dominated his devil and the cock eternally crowed.

Above them suddenly rose steep cliffs covered with coarse grass, and, if not daisies, at least their French cousins. No houses here, though piles of rubble and a bit of crumbled wall told that the abbey buildings must once have straggled down the face of this cliff. Far above small peasant children climbed and called, or swung bare legs from an outcrop of rock, and still higher a small hunched figure sat all alone on a rock. Cynthia was about to say, “Oh, there’s the little American,” but remembering what Nancy had just called her, held her tongue and busied herself with collecting a bouquet for Mrs. Brewster’s room.

Presently wearying of this she sat on a stone to survey the steep climb she had already come and the sands beyond that. It seemed to her that the color of the sand had changed, darkened, in the past ten minutes. Idly she noted that the children had gone; already she could see them scampering past the rock at the base, saw them disappear. She looked back of her. Nothing here, no connection with the town. To get home one must go the way they had come. Just beyond where Nancy was still picking flowers was the American girl. Cynthia’s gaze took her in with the rest of the scene. Suddenly she was startled almost out of her wits by a small figure that tore past her, yelling at the top of his lungs.

She sprang to her feet, and was still more startled to see Nancy come pelting after the boy.

“La marée ... la marée montante ...”

“What is it?” asked Cynthia, gazing after the small figure that had passed. A good model that boy would be, with his wind blown curls, his startled eyes.

Nancy grabbed her arm, shouted in her ear, “Run ... run ...”

“What ... why?” Cynthia’s feet pounded after Nancy. Over her shoulder Nancy flung, “‘The tide,’ he said. ‘The tide is rising.’”

Cynthia looked back. The girl behind them had risen from her rock. With a wrench Cynthia freed her arm from Nancy’s grasp, put hands to mouth and megaphoned. “Hurry! Hurry! The tide!”

She seemed to get the idea for immediately she came leaping down over the rocks. Cynthia paused only once to glance behind and see what good speed the girl was making, then raced to catch up with Nancy. Almost together the three reached the sands.

So that was why they had changed so rapidly from ochre to lavender. Water, tidal water, seeping swiftly, menacingly from beneath, pouring in from every side. But the sand at the base of the rocks was still dry, it was hardly five minutes race around the rocks to the end of the little street. Hearts pounding, breath sobbing, they reached it together.

Cynthia could not stop there. She wanted to reach her hotel, her room, feel safe ground, familiar ground that could not dissolve into seas beneath her feet, before she stopped. As she tore through the hallway, passed the astonished eyes of Madame at the desk, Nancy was close behind. Together they dragged the little American in with them, slumped together on the two beds.

“Well!” gasped Cynthia.

“Well!” Nancy echoed her. “My good gosh, Cynthia, that was a close call!” The buttercup girl rose first, stood for a long moment at the window looking out. “Look here ...” she said at last, seemed to have trouble with her voice and spoke again, “Come here, you two.” It was the first they had heard her speak.

Cynthia who had by now slightly recovered her breath, felt that her knees would bear her again. But when she looked out she nearly lost what breath she had gained.

“Nancy ... oh Nancy!”

From base of rock to farthest horizon the sea rushed, tumbling, foaming, stealthily rising, rising. Ten minutes later and they would have been engulfed in it, even five minutes later and the quicksands, forerunner of the rush of waves, would have caught them.

“They say it rises sixteen feet every tide.” Nancy’s voice was shaking.

The best thing that could have happened was the entrance of Mrs. Brewster. Having heard Madame’s story at the desk she immediately took cheerful charge of the situation. “We’ll have lunch here in the room,” she suggested. “I’ll order anything you like, and then all three of you had better lie down for an hour. This is Miss ...?”

“Comstock, Betsey Comstock,” murmured the buttercup girl.

Cynthia, endeavoring to follow Mrs. Brewster’s cheerful lead, asked if the hotel couldn’t serve some escargots, snails. She had heard they were good, and she said she felt in a mood to experiment. Actually not even snails for lunch seem very reckless after their recent experience. Betsey still seemed a little dazed but Nancy had several wildly fantastic suggestions and Mrs. Brewster rang for the waiter, ordered lunch to be brought to their room.

They had scarcely sat down to eat when a knock sounded imperatively on the door. As Mrs. Brewster answered it Cynthia saw beyond her shoulder a man’s face, distraught and white.

“Oh, Madame,” he cried. “Is Miss ... I was told ... that is. ...”

“Robert!” Betsey Comstock had rushed past Mrs. Brewster, and flung herself into the young man’s arms. Smiling, Mrs. Brewster discreetly closed the door, but murmurs and soft voices as though in reconciliation sounded beyond it. The girls were half way through lunch when Betsey, such a changed Betsey, all smiles and radiance, reappeared.

“Apologies, please,” she begged charmingly. “Robert had a luncheon engagement with a man he met here at the hotel, an architect. So I did not ask him in. But the rest, I’d like to explain.”

To Cynthia it sounded very romantic, a young Basque, Yberri was the name, educated in America for his career of architecture and Betsey, now engaged to be married to him, with her own career as a costume designer. What could be nicer?

“Who do you work for?” asked the practical Nancy. “Have you sold anything yet?”

“I had my first act in Cochran’s Revue, the recent one, in London.”

“Oh! Moms and I saw that. Did you see the lovely ballet with the Chinese pagodas on their heads?”

Betsey flushed a little and smiled. “That one was mine. ...”

“Cynthia, she’s good,” Nancy turned enthusiastically to the others. “The stuff was swell. ...”

Betsey continued. They were to be married next week, in Paris, and return to the States, Dad and Robert and she. Betsey had letters of introduction to two or three big theatrical producers in New York and promise of further work with Cochran.

“Grand!” applauded Nancy.

But the trouble, it seemed, was this: Robert didn’t want his wife to continue her work after they were married.

“Oh dear!” murmured Cynthia. Just suppose Chick didn’t want her to keep on with her covers. But then Chick was an artist also; he understood.

“Stop your painting?” asked Nancy, puzzled to understand anyone in a family that didn’t design or illustrate or paint.

“Oh no, he’s willing I should keep on with the designing, but not willing I should earn money with it.”

Which explained their quarrel at the table last night, explained why Betsey had gone off today by herself on the rocks.

“But now it’s all right, isn’t it?” asked Cynthia.

Betsey’s smile became somewhat less bright. “No ... o,” she admitted. “We made it up, the quarrel I mean. But nothing is decided, nothing definite.”

“It’ll work out somehow,” consoled Cynthia. “Just see if it doesn’t.”

Betsey of the buttercup hair was still on her mind next morning. Nancy had volunteered to go on a hunt for the small boy of the hill, the one who had warned them of the tide. Cynthia had an idea that he would make a good model for her next magazine cover. She herself was sharing the privilege of the cabbage patch and the shade of the parapet with Mrs. Brewster, both painting busily, when Betsey’s voice sounded slightly above Cynthia’s right ear.

“’S good,” murmured the voice.

Cynthia looked up. “Hi!” she said, around the paintbrush in her mouth, but her gaze wandered back to the sunny ochre of the sands and the blue-green of the cabbages. Difficult to depict sunlight against that false horizon; you need blue sky to make a landscape look sunny.

“I’m going up to the abbey,” whispered Betsey with an eye on Mrs. Brewster busily painting along the wall.

“Stop on the way back. And don’t fall into any oubliette.” But after she had gone Cynthia still worried about her. It was all mixed up with the hue of cabbages in sunlight. Why was Betsey alone, had they quarreled again? If that Robert Yberri had any sense he’d let her keep on with her work ... oh glory, how did you get the color of that shadow! Cynthia took a peek at Mrs. Brewster’s oil sketch, almost groaned at the comparison, but mixed a tiny drop of rose madder with her wash and cocked her head on one side. Perhaps that was it!

An hour later she put the last touch on it, yawned, stretched and looked up. Mrs. Brewster had tactfully stolen away. Below the fortress wall the sands were slowly darkening into lavender as they had yesterday and the shadow of the wall no longer gave her shelter. Time to pack up and go home.

But with her paints packed, her box strapped neatly, she perched on the wall to watch again that relentless tide. First the darkening of the sand. One could not say at just what instant the lavender began to gleam with moisture, at what precise second one noted water seeping into this hollow and that, at what tick of the watch the hollows joined, ran into each other, became larger, ran into a hundred thin, continuous streams across the wide expanse of sand.

Someone was coming up the steps, a man with thick brown hair uncovered, with American plus fours.

“Miss Wanstead?” asked Betsey’s Robert.

Cynthia nodded, then glanced back at the sands below, and gasped. Where an instant before had been wet sand with a few thin streams across it a dozen rushing rivers now flowed, joining swiftly into a relentless, heaving sea.

“Frightening, isn’t it?” said Betsey’s Robert. “We saw it rise like that two days ago. That’s why I’m here. I know how dangerous it is and I want to thank you for bringing Betsey back yesterday, you and Miss Brewster.”

“Oh,” murmured Cynthia. “It ... it wasn’t anything.” Then she laughed. “I mean, of course, it was a lot. Only she would have got back. ...”

“She says she wouldn’t. Of course she could have stayed there eight or nine hours.”

“Or you could have sent for her in a boat,” suggested the more practical Cynthia.

“Anyway, I’m tremendously grateful.” He sat down on the wall beside her. “Imposing, isn’t it?” He gestured toward the great abbey behind them. “One of the most imposing sites in all the world, and combined with what man has done to it, it’s stupendous. You’re an artist, aren’t you?”

Cynthia admitted it. “And you too ... and Betsey.”

“Betsey’s a smart kid.” And suddenly Cynthia thought, “Why, he’s awfully in love with her,” and liked him better, even if he were as stubborn as a mule.

“Is she?” she asked aloud and ingenuously, so that Robert had to brag a little.

“She’s worked for Cochran, you know; costumes,” with quiet pride in the ability of his fiancée.

“Marvelous. She must be good. Though of course he takes lots of beginners, doesn’t he, for a short tryout?” She knew nothing of the kind, but spoke as one with inside information.

Robert flushed and set his jaw. “Not at all,” he said stiffly. “Betsey’s good enough to keep on with him, show after show. And to get work in New York too, if she wishes.”

“Really?” Cynthia’s eyebrows expressed her scepticism. “Only of course, once she’s married. ... I mean no girl can really manage two jobs, can she?”

She almost giggled at the way he took it. “I ...” his mouth hung open a minute. But stubborn people were contrary, too, and Robert was no exception. “Well, after all, I expect to keep on with architecture after I’m married.”

“Oh yes, but a man ...” Cynthia’s air was still one of polite incredulity. “Here’s Betsey now.”

Buttercup hair windblown, cheeks very pink. “But my dear, you’ve been crying again,” thought Cynthia and wondered if it wouldn’t be tactful to withdraw immediately. Betsey herself answered that.

“Finished your sketch, Cynthia? I’m so glad you waited. I’ve got a telegram to show you. ... I’m leaving tonight, if I can get across to the mainland.” She was carefully avoiding Robert’s eyes.

Betsey had a little pink slip in her hand. Cynthia took it and read aloud, as well as she could, the garbled English of the French wire. “Miss Elizabeth Comstock. Hotel des Poissons ... and so on. Please be in London Monday the eleventh, my office. Stop. Wish to talk over two scenes in new revue. Stop. Charles Cochran.”

So. Betsey had made her decision. What would Betsey’s Robert say to that. Cynthia looked up, was about to burst into congratulations when the man forestalled her.

“Betsey! I’m so glad! But hadn’t we better hurry? I’ve got to pack and you know how slow I am. We’ll get your Dad to chaperon us as far as London and get married there instead of in Paris. This Cochran thing is too grand a chance to miss.”

Cynthia, viewing Betsey’s radiant astonishment, thought almost smugly, “What price Nancy’s little Miss Fix-it?”

CHAPTER 5

The Basque Country

THE CUCKOO

It was Nancy and Mrs. Brewster who had suggested the Basque country. This was partly because Cynthia needed a new type of child’s head for her covers for Little One’s Magazine, and partly because they thought it would be a new and amusing adventure. It bore also the extra recommendation of economy. Mrs. Brewster had a friend in a tiny village, well off the beaten track of tourists. He was an artist, he would see that Cynthia found good accommodations, if not in his own house, then in a house nearby. Good, she would write to him, find out for sure if he was still living. For he was, she said, old, old.

The Basque country seemed, to Cynthia, a very long way off from Paris, and from the Brewsters in Brittany, and from all the places she had grown to know. The scare and loneliness of Paris had been exorcised by her first success with the portrait of Nono. No place where you can earn a living can be, after you have proved yourself, really strange or unfriendly. But miles and miles away, in the southwestern corner of France it might be different.

Somewhat reluctantly, feeling a little forlorn and abandoned, Cynthia left the Brewsters in Britanny and returned to Paris. France is a great spider web of glittering rails of railways, but Paris, like a giant, not unfriendly, spider, sits in the heart, if not the exact center, and to go almost anywhere it is cheaper and easier to return to that city and start all over again.

An hour on the train, and the feeling of forlornness began to disappear. Under Nancy’s stern tutelage Cynthia’s French had improved enormously. Now she knew how to order a meal, where and how to buy her lunch, if there was no dining car on the train; knew that she must give up her ticket at the exit barrier, but retain it until then, and half a hundred other small things that went to make life and travel smoother and more pleasant.

Going back to Paris was almost like going home again. Her own little room up near the roof in the Hotel St. Severin, or one very like it except that the wallpaper sprawled magenta fuschias on a green ground instead of huge coins of blue and gold and purple on a red ground. A dinner with Alice and the Murchisons, and a pressing invitation to bring over her bags from the hotel and stay with them as long as she could. Then she encountered, of all people, Stasia Carruthers, in front of the Café de la Paix, and was carried off to Rumplemeier’s for one of their scrumptious teas.

News was exchanged. Stasia had been down to Switzerland, was back now for some fittings and to buy some new hats. Gaily Cynthia plunged into her own adventures, even to how she had sold three portraits of children in the little town of Le Conquet, once she had succeeded in breaking down the reserve of the villagers. For just a little while she found herself envying Stasia; her new, smart little Paris hat, her trick little silk suit, fresh from the scissors of Chanel. Looking up suddenly she surprised a strange expression in Stasia’s dark eyes. Could it be envy? Envy for the greater adventure of earning your way. Anyone could buy his way on a fat letter of credit. But to earn as you went, that was the greater risk, hence the greater adventure.

Cynthia chuckled to herself, tucked a stray curl beneath the brim of the hat she had bought for fifty francs in the Rue St. Roch, and ceased to envy Stasia.

Two days later, having restocked her box of water colors on the Boulevard Montparnasse, that parnassus of all good little art students, she took train at some uncanny hour of the early morning for Bordeaux. There, late in the afternoon and from the shouting hotel runners at the station, each screaming the particular merits of his own hotel, she chose the Hotel de New York. It seemed homelike as to name at least.

It proved dingy and down at heels, but with a charming view out over one of Bordeaux’ countless city squares. Cynthia yawned through her dinner, left an early call for breakfast, and was off again almost before daylight for Gotien, in the Basses-Pyrénées. Three times that day she changed trains, until, from sheer weariness Gotien began to seem like some Never-never land, always retreating as one advanced. And beyond Gotien—the address she was bound for was Mouleon-Soule.

She had gone through the gate with her suitcase and sketch box and stood, almost shaking with weariness full in the afternoon sun that streamed across the dusty, cobblestoned plaza. No one could tell her how to get to Mouleon-Soule. But perhaps if she could find the station hotel, get a good dinner and a night’s sleep, she could grapple, tomorrow, with the problem.

Then from beyond the ragged plane trees that lined the plaza came a little shabby, stoop-shouldered man in a Basque beret timidly displaying a wide, toothless smile. His English savored quaintly of both French and American.

“Is it that this is the Mademoiselle Euanstead?”

Cynthia squinted against the sun. She was too weary to think. Was someone to meet her here?

“Yes, I’m Miss Wanstead.”

“Bon! We had the letter from Madame Brewster.”

“Oh, then you are Monsieur Marge. How nice! I couldn’t discover a train for Mouleon.”

“No train,” he shook his head. “Only the tramcars. But come and meet my wife.”

Madame was a plump little dumpling in plain worn black, knitting on one of the benches beneath the trees. She beamed a silent welcome and carried her knitting with her, needles clicking without a break, into the tram which had been waiting, small town fashion, for Monsieur Marge to find his guest. For an hour, while Cynthia struggled to keep her eyes open, they rattled and banged through clouds of dust toward the tiny town of Mouleon, then out again into open country.

Sunset had passed and it was nearly dark when they reached their final stop and Cynthia stumbled up the path behind her hosts. Twice, during the simple dinner, she found herself nodding. Then at some brief remark from Madame, Monsieur Marge suggested kindly:

“My wife sees that you are very tired. I will light the candle and show you to your room.” Behind him a silly little cuckoo clock chirped nine times, as Cynthia stumbled up the bed.

Cynthia woke slowly, aware of an unusual sound. Something, someone was snoring. Surely—no, the sound couldn’t possibly be human. She lay still a moment, listening, then decided she really must investigate, and sat up against her pillows.

She was in a high, story-book bed, such a bed as might have accommodated the princess of a Grimm fairy-tale. With four high posts, heavy dark draperies sweeping the floor, and, actually, three little steps of a ladder to lead up to it. She leaned over and peered down at them, then gave a delighted bounce. She had been too sleepy the night before to notice those steps, but she did remember her host’s very French warning that the night air was dangerous and that she must keep her windows tight closed. But after Madame and Monsieur had departed she had crossed to the casements and opened them wide.

Now she pattered, barefooted, down the steps and leaned out over the low sill. The curious snores came from just below. Grunts, not snores! Oh, the darlings! Pigs, little ones, and all ten of them very vocal and very hungry and directly beneath her window.

“Well, I never thought I’d live over a pigpen,” laughed Cynthia. “Isn’t that France for you!”

At the end of the long room a dusty old mirror in a tall gold frame reflected the polished parquet floor with its dark oak inlay, the huge heavy furniture, built to last many lifetimes, the two high windows, and the Basque Pyrénées, towering, blue, beyond the green of rolling fields. In the center of it all Cynthia herself, like some new kind of a blue-and-white striped, pyjamaed, fairy-tale princess; dark hair a tangle of curls, blue eyes wide and amused, bare pink toes pattering over the shining floor.

“Well, you certainly are an anach ... anachronism ... or however you pronounce it when you mean you’re out of place!” she twinkled at the fairy in the mirror. “Wonder what time they breakfast here! Gosh, I’m hungry!”

She tiptoed to the door. It swung silently on well-oiled hinges. No footsteps sounded below but there was a murmur of soft voices, the smell of toast—she sniffed—and chocolate. Then from somewhere in the house a bird call sounded. Nine times.

A cuckoo clock. Nine cuckoos. My, but it was late! Hurry and get dressed, my dear. She scampered back to fling on her clothes. “Glory, what a day!”

She must have slept twelve hours solid. Goodness, how heavenly the pines smelled, how wonderful this peace and quiet after the hot asphalt, the ceaseless noise, the rattle and scream of Paris.

She ran a comb through her hair, gave a dab of powder to her nose and opened the door again. The wide shallow stairs led directly into the sun-drenched kitchen.

Madame, looking up, beamed good morning from her work over the stove. “Bon jour, bon jour,” and seemed very proud of even that much French. Her own language was Basque, of course.

“Good morning, Mam’selle Euanstead. You have slep’ well?”

“Gorgeously! Is this for me, Monsieur Marge?”

A single place at the kitchen table was set with a bowl of hot cocoa on a red checked napkin. There was another napkin, a big spoon, crisp hot bread fresh toasted in the oven, and a huge sweet orange.

“An egg also?” asked Monsieur Marge from the doorstep where he sat with his pipe. “No? Then when you have finished a second cup of cocoa I shall show you my hive’ and my bee’ and my studio.”

The latter proved to be a small, dingy, not too well-lighted building behind the rambling, whitewashed, red-roofed house. Here dusty canvases and dried tubes of paint, bits of old tapestry and ancient stretcher-frames were piled and presided over by two of those artist’s lay figures that resemble life-sized, wigless dolls.

Monsieur Marge turned over the quaint old pictures to display them and Cynthia murmured appreciation, trying hard to find something to admire in each. But they were of such an ancient manner, of the “brown gravy” school, with shadows dead as brown paint and thick, lifeless color, that proper applause was difficult.

“You know I paint in America too?” he asked her proudly.

“Yes, Mrs. Brewster told me. Where was that?”

“I live in Philadelphia fifteen years. That was before the war. Then I live in South America with my son, long time. Many Basque live in South America. Then I come home here, to my old farm I buy when I young man ... many year ago. That was before you were born.” He chuckled at his own age. “Long ago I paint those panorama for the World Fair in Chicago.”

“Goodness! Did you? I’ve heard of them but never saw one.”

“Yes, indeed. They be gre-e-a-t painting.” He spread his arms to indicate an immense canvas. “And figures modeled like life. I paint twelve of those. They go all round the country. Twelve Battle of Gettysburg, with men in uniform in the wheat field. Battle of Gettysburg, she was fought in a wheat field.” He chuckled again and sucked on his empty pipe. “We work all night, many night, on that to get her ready for the opening of the Fair. We were all French, the artists who work on her. But the day after the opening we close the doors again, take her down and paint again all night long.”

“Oh, why?” cried Cynthia.

“Because,” he grinned in cheerful toothlessness. “We have paint French wheat field. Full of puppies. American wheat field have no puppies.” And he roared with laughter over the ancient jest.

“Pup ...” for a moment Cynthia was puzzled. Then she too laughed. “Oh yes, poppies!” For all day yesterday she had admired the glorious silky red flowers blooming among the wheat beside the railway.

“You want to paint this morning?” And, when Cynthia decided that she might as well start immediately, “Go down the road and then turn right, by the mill. That is near and pretty, and tomorrow you can go further. You have everything you want? Oil? Turpentine? Oh, you paint in the water color. That is pretty, too.”

So Cynthia settled down contentedly on the old Basque farm. It was two miles through the hot sunlight to the nearest village but she found plenty to paint within easy walking distance of the Marge house; nearby houses with their Spanish iron balconies overhung with roses and vines; the sturdy Basque farmers at work in the fields, and their great cream colored oxen that paced so slowly along the road. The houses were white with steep roofs and wide eaves of deep gray and heavy shutters painted green, and the vines, sprayed with arsenic green made rich shadow patterns on the old walls. Then she found an old stone church with the three-peaked tower so characteristic of Basque village churches and beneath its porch an iron grill to discourage the pigs from entering the place of worship. She peeped through the stone doorways where the lintels bore blurred dates of the early seventeenth century, to peer into the dim, dark timbered kitchens on whose table-high hearthstones a tiny fire of twigs burned beneath the black kettle on a crane. With many of the women she had a pleasant nodding and smiling acquaintance, but she spoke no word of their language and found that her French was not understood. Besides, these people seemed unusually reserved. She could establish no contact with them.

Cynthia began to suspect that Monsieur Marge was in a similar position and was very lonely because of it. He had lived so long in America that he had lost touch with these, his own people, and when he had returned to them found that they considered him a foreigner. He was now neither Basque nor American.

It was a valley of enchantment hidden between the high snow capped peaks of the Pyrénées. Each day was as clear-skied, as sunny and warm as the one before it and Cynthia woke each morning in her fairytale bed to look forward to another bright morning of painting, another sleepy afternoon of sketching. Still, she reminded herself after a week of this, she wasn’t getting any further with her job for the month. She had come down here to do a Basque cover for the Little Ones’ Magazine. Somewhere she must find herself a model.

Her second week in the Basque country had started. Monday slipped by, Tuesday evening she sat, as usual on the doorstep after a late dinner. Monsieur Marge smoked placidly, Madame knitted in the half dark of the vine-hung verandah. There was a sound of cattle bells far down the smooth winding road and the mountains leaned, purple dark, against the sunset.

Cynthia and the old man had been comparing their memories of old songs. Astonishing how many of the old ones, the really old ones that belonged to mother’s, even to grandmother’s day, he remembered from his years in America. There was “Sweet Marie” and “Sweet Rosey O’Grady,” and “Sidewalks of New York.”

“Oh yes, they sing that still,” cried Cynthia and whistled it with him. Madame hummed and smiled placidly while her fingers seemed to twinkle in time to the gay little tune.

“A Bicycle Built for Two,” he suggested.

Yes, Cynthia knew that one. She had heard it in the movies. A moment of silence then, while they paused to think of more, and from the dark room behind them came a cheerful “Cuck ... oo. Cuckoo ...!”

“What makes the bird in the clock cuckoo?” asked Cynthia when she had finished counting nine warbles.

“Wait, I show you.” Monsieur sprang to his feet and disappeared into the kitchen, to return a moment later with the clock beneath his arm.

Madame gave a little chuckle and Monsieur explained. “We bought this on our wedding trip, in Switzerland, almost fifty years ago.”

He set it down on the step and returned for a lamp, which he lighted and placed beside the clock. Then, with delicate fingers he removed the screws in the back and exposed the carved wooden works for Cynthia to see. Unlike the usual cuckoo-clock this was all self-contained, without the long pendulum and the heavy iron weights that usually hang down below the little box. Its face and the surrounding frame was like old lace, interwoven with tiny intricate figures and small deer and cows and squirrels, the whole dark with age and good French furniture polish.

“See,” explained the old man. “There are two little b’lows, here, and here,” and his finger indicated the tiny bellows of leather, like those used to blow a fire, “Now watch. I make him sing.”

He turned the white hands to ten o’clock, and the cuckoo popped out, opened his little red mouth and warbled. One small bellow went Cu ... ck, and the other, immediately afterwards, went ooooo. Cuck ... oo. Cuck ... oo! Over and over. Ten times.

“Oh, I never knew what made him do it,” cried Cynthia. “Now let me try.” The bird popped out in such a quaintly serious fashion that one wanted to laugh every time he appeared.

“I will keep him here and oil him in the morning,” decided Monsieur Marge. “Perhaps, in the night, he will attract other cuckoos, yes?” Madame chuckled.

“Does she understand English?” asked Cynthia, getting up to put the clock on the verandah table.

“I un’ stand,” murmured Madame, in the darkness and her husband shook his head. “Only little. But she too lazy to speak anything but Basque. We are conservative peepul, we Basque. Per’aps it is as well. Otherwise we could not remain so entrench’ against the centuries of invaders, and of change.” And as the night deepened and the stars came out Cynthia heard old tales of Charlemagne and of his blond barbarians from the north who had been defeated in these very hills. Of how the Basque had dwelt here for hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years, unconquered, unchanging.

“It may be because our language is so difficul’,” explained the old man with pride. “We have a saying that the Devil once came here, to our country and stayed seven years. In that time he learn but two words. ... “By” for “Yes,” and “Es,” for “No.” At las’ disgusted by his waste of time, he flew away again, and soon forgot even those two. That is why the evil never comes here.”

He sighed in the darkness and Cynthia felt a pang of pity. Even here, among his own people, he was homesick, denied a closer contact with them because of his long years in America.

The next morning Cynthia unfolded the camp stool, on which she sat to sketch, beneath the vines at the side of the farmhouse. A stone-paved walk ran back to the little ramshackle studio and M. Marge pottered about in the sunlight with his beehives. Cynthia opened her sketch book, squeezed color onto her palette and set to work.

The cuckoo clock behind her ticked steadily with no relation to the hour of the day. Cynthia, rapidly sketching in the grape arbor and the green door in the white wall beyond it, wondered how to get the effect of spattered sunlight where the light dribbled down through leaves, and discovered with a little thrill that part of the trick lay in breaking the color, patting it on in little spats of the brush with flecks of white paper showing between, part in letting the shadow actually dribble off her brush so that it was lightest farthest from the leaves.

A small, cooing voice sounded behind her. Turning, she saw on the path, a little girl of six or maybe less, very Basque in her bright blouse and dark blue cotton skirt and bare brown feet thrust into rope soled espadrilles. Her eyes were soft and brown and her hair had been plaited into two pigtails, so tight that they seemed actually to drag her eyelids upwards at the corners.

“Oh, you duck!” breathed Cynthia. “What fun if I could paint you!”

The brown eyes danced with mischief, and the small mouth was puckered into a demure rosebud. What could have drawn her up the path from the road? Cynthia’s glance followed the child’s. The tick of the clock? But surely she had heard a clock before. Then Cynthia remembered that a moment before it had erratically struck eleven. Laughing, she gestured a query towards the clock. Was that it?

The small one nodded shyly.

“Sure, I’ll show it to you,” Cynthia offered. “Want to see the birdie, do you?” She put down book and brushes and led the way up the steps. Then she turned the hands gently as she had seen M. Marge do the night before. The bird answered with a startled “Cuck ... oo!”

“Oh!” The brown eyes danced with delight, the small hands clapped ecstatically. The child came closer.

“Now the next will be twelve,” Cynthia said, though of course that wouldn’t mean anything to this infant, and turned the hands again. This time the bird gave a most satisfactory performance. By the time his song was finished the child’s face was so close to the little flapping doors that Cynthia was afraid she would pop inside, out of sheer rapturous delight.

“If I could get her, just so, with her head turned like that, and those quaint little pigtails, and the sunlight behind her—but I’m afraid I’m not clever enough,” mourned Cynthia. “No; it’s impossible.” Then to the child, “Birdie’s all gone, my dear. No more today. I refuse to ruin M. Marge’s wedding present just because a Basque baby wants to hear the cuckoo clock. Sit down won’t you, and amuse me while I work.”

Monsieur Marge came up the walk from his beehives. He said something in Basque to the child, who answered stammeringly. “She should not be here,” he explained. “She lives down there, the Yturbe house. She is the only one left. The two sons died in the war, and this is the only grandchild. The old people worship her. I will take her home.”

Cynthia was sorry to see her go. “I wish I could paint her,” she thought again wistfully, but she knew M. Marge was not on good enough terms with his neighbors to make the unusual request. This was not Paris, where everyone knew about artists and where models seem to drop ripe from every lamp-post, blossom in every zinc with your breakfast cocoa.

That afternoon a hive of bees swarmed and M. Marge was so busy with them that the little cuckoo clock waited another night unoiled, upon the verandah. “I’ll do the job tomorrow and put it back in the morning,” he promised Madame. “It is quite safe there.”

But apparently it wasn’t so safe. At least when Cynthia came down to breakfast M. Marge reported the clock was gone.

“Gone? ... The cuckoo clock?” Cynthia heard herself repeating idiotically. “Well! but goodness! Who on earth would take it?”

M. Marge shook his head and Madame, pouring the morning chocolate, murmured something in Basque.

“She says she is sorry to lose our wedding present.”

“Oh dear, I feel terribly responsible,” mourned Cynthia. “If I only hadn’t asked you to bring it out and show me.”

“It is my own fault.” The old man became firmly cheerful. “Mais non, Mademoiselle, I am a careless old man. I should not have left the clock on the verandah. But the Basque are honest peepul. We do not steal and we are too far from the town for gypsies or tramps. I cannot figure it out.”

Cynthia painted that morning with a wretched feeling of responsibility. “I could get them a new clock,” she told herself, “but it wouldn’t be the same.” She had chosen a spot down the main road, where two small stone, white-washed houses, overgrown with rambling roses, were as theatrically picturesque as a scene from the Follies. But the sketch was not very satisfactory. “It’s not my kind of thing,” she fretted. “It’s fun to do, but I’d rather paint people. Wonder where my little friend of yesterday is. She must live in one of those houses. ...”

A team of oxen plodded slowly down the dusty road, brilliantly golden beneath the shadow of the blue dyed sheepskin that lay atop their heavy yoke, their eyes hidden behind a heavy fringe of bright colored net. Their driver walked ahead, his makhila over his shoulder rested on the yoke to guide the animals.

Cynthia listened to the soft jangle of bells till it died in the distance, then decided she was hungry; that was what must be wrong with her sketch, and packed up her materials. The Marges never ate lunch. Cynthia had discovered that a continental breakfast did not sustain one very well from eight A.M. till five in the afternoon, and after two days of semi-starvation had persuaded Madame to give her a cold meal at noon. Today there was sliced duckling and a pleasant salad set on the red checked table cloth beneath the sun spangled arbor.

She finished her raspberries, with the thick pat of rich sour cream and the crust of warm bread and idly watched M. Marge talking to someone beyond the beehives. It looked like the old man in the Yturbe household, Thomasina’s grandfather. Cynthia wondered at that, for she knew the two men were not close friends. “I wish I could get that child to paint,” she thought idly, remembering the small eager face of the day before.

M. Marge came slowly and alone up the stone flagged walk and sat down on the step beside Cynthia’s luncheon table.

“There must be gypsies here,” he stated, “For Thomasina has been stolen.”

“Thomasina!” cried Cynthia, aghast. “How perfectly dreadful!” and felt her throat tighten. For a moment she could not speak for fear of bursting into tears. Little Thomasina! “When ... how long?” she asked after a moment.

“Perhaps not stolen ... perhaps. ... But she has been gone since early this morning. It is two now. She did not come home for her noon meal. Her grandfather came to ask if we had seen her. She has never gone from the dooryard before, not until yesterday when she came here. Her father thinks she may have strayed down the road and met someone; she was very unhappy over a little thrush they had, which died. She may have been looking for him.”

Cynthia knew those little thrushes in their willow cages which hung outside so many French doorways.

“They are afraid of the canal, and the mill-pond.”

“Oh, but surely ...” Cynthia shivered and was silent. No, nothing like that could happen to someone that one knew! Absently she pushed away the last of her raspberries. They were her favorite fruit but she had lost any appetite for them.

“Painting this afternoon?” asked her host, trying to be cheerful.

Yes, Cynthia had thought she’d take the tram into the tiny village and sketch the interior of the old ruined fort, with the remains of the sally-port and guardhouse.

Monsieur Marge surveyed the sky, unflinchingly blue. “Too hot to go into town,” he commented. “Why not stay and we go hunt for mushrooms. Madame wishes some for the dinner tonight. I know deep woods, cool, where the sun does not strike.”

City-bred Cynthia had never gathered mushrooms; it sounded like a new and amusing experience, and it would certainly be cooler than sketching on that hot and sunny hill beyond the town. Besides she didn’t really want to go far from the house, in case little Thomasina should be found ... no, when she should be found.

Cynthia went to her room for a wide shade hat and came downstairs again to find M. Marge ready for her. He bore a leather bound makhila, the Basque walking stick, with its graven brass binding and leather strap.

“Won’t we need a basket or something?”

“No. I show you.”

The method, it seemed, was to string the fungus on a long thin peeled rod. They were big things, flabby and pale lavender, rather like unpleasantly raw liver, but Monsieur assured her they were delicious when cooked.

They had found the grove about two miles from the house up an old logging road now nearly overgrown with brush and deep damp moss. The pines rose huge and straight and the air was cool, but after an hour or more of scrabbling over dead logs and grubbing among fallen leaves for the mushrooms Cynthia was glad to sink wearily to a seat on a mossy stone.

“Ouff but I’m weary. Goodness, how you can walk!” she exclaimed to the pleased old man.

“I have been hard worker in my time.”

“There’s a funny noise about here,” Cynthia commented after a moment of silence. “Sounds rather like a cricket, yet not. ... I wonder. ...” She listened again and as the old man started to speak held up her hand for silence. There was no breeze. The pine boughs high overhead scarcely moved. There were certainly no crickets about, yet what was that noise?

Then from a thicket just a few yards away came a familiar call. “Cuck ... oo! Cuck ... ooooo!”

“Your clock!” Cynthia almost shouted, and jumped to her feet. Monsieur Marge was right behind her as she parted the brush, looked downward. She chuckled and held back the branch that he might see.

There, wrapped in an old shawl and fast asleep was Thomasina Yturbe. In her arms, its placid little face turned to the skies, ticked the imperturbable cuckoo clock.

“Well, we’ve found one kidnapper at least,” laughed Cynthia somewhat shakily. “Shall we wake her up?” Poor little thing, she had come a long way in this heat and the clock was quite a weight for those small arms.

“It is too far to carry her home,” advised the old man.

The child stirred at his voice, opened one sleepy eye. Her face was pink as a seashell from the rough warmth of the old shawl beneath her. For a moment she blinked like a little owl, then recognized them and beamed, murmuring something. Monsieur chuckled and repeated it for Cynthia’s benefit.

“She said the bird wouldn’t sing.”

“Come on honey. Time to go home.” Cynthia’s words might not have been understood, but her brightly matter of fact tone was sufficient. Thomasina scrambled to her feet. “Here, better let me take the clock. No? All right. But let me carry the shawl, anyway. I wonder why she brought the shawl?” she puzzled.

Monsieur had the suggestion that it had been one thrown over the thrush’s cage at night.

“Poor kid,” murmured Cynthia.

It was a long journey back. Monsieur had the two long sticks of mushrooms. Cynthia, toward the last, was so far trusted as to be allowed the clock but Thomasina kept one hand in Cynthia’s. One was to understand that she was not weary, but she wanted closer contact with her little bird. The clock itself ticked steadily throughout the journey and twice it even cuckooed.

It was late and the sun was low, throwing long shadows across the road as they came down it towards the Yturbe farm. Cynthia heard the soft cooing of doves, the grunt of the little pigs that lived beneath her window. Thomasina stumbled once or twice.

They neared the doorway with its seventeenth century date on the lintel. Someone inside was sobbing.

“I won’t go with you.” Cynthia pushed the child forward and nodded that Monsieur Marge was to follow her. This might be—who could tell?—just the right moment for him to become a Basque again.

Thomasina, the clock again in her arms, stumbled through the doorway. Cynthia heard nothing for a moment, then such a heartfelt cry of delight and joy as made her, for the second time that day, brush away the tears. Followed, in three voices, much talk in the rapid Basque tongue, and after a moment Grandmother Yturbe came out, to throw her arms about the petite Americaine.

“She says,” twinkled Monsieur behind her, “that you are wonderful, that you found her little cabbage.”

“Non—non. It was Monsieur,” Cynthia gestured towards her host. “It’s all right anyway, Thomasina would have come home for dinner,” protested the embarrassed Cynthia.

They got away at last, but there was more to come.

After dinner Cynthia and Madame were sitting beneath the vines. Madame’s fingers flew steadily as her needles ate up the gray yarn, and moonlight bright as day dripped through the dark leaves of the arbor. Someone came slowly up the stone walk and spoke in Basque. It was Thomasina’s grandfather.

“He has come to thank the American lady,” explained M. Marge after a moment’s conversation and added that he had told M. Yturbe that Thomasina was to keep the clock for herself. “After all, we have no grandchildren ourselves.” And a moment later he translated again, “He asks if the American lady will do him a portrait of his little one; he will of course be proud to pay for it.”

“I’d adore it,” cried Cynthia, “Oh, what a day!”

The men moved off together, talking. Cynthia saw them cross the road slowly, two old men together.

Madame, chuckling richly, made one of her rare remarks in English: “They not be back till late.” But she seemed more pleased than concerned.

“I guess that means M. Marge has become all Basque at last,” thought Cynthia sleepily.

CHAPTER 6

Carcassonne

ROMANCE IN CARCASSONNE

Cynthia had long ago learned how to say in French “Stand still. Turn a little to the right ... to the left. Raise the chin please.” And finally and most urgent, again “stand still!” One needed these phrases constantly in the one language the model understood. She had had occasion to use them all, and more besides, this afternoon, for the ragged little urchin, posing against a background of old stone house and carved fourteenth century doorway, was an imp, though a delightful one, and had far too large a circle of friends vitally interested in what he was doing. Cynthia glanced up from her painting and for the twentieth time in ten minutes sighed in exasperation.

Every small child’s head, including of course the model’s, had turned to watch the small group crossing the square. It was just the usual collection of American tourists; every child in the city must have seen their like hundreds of times, herded by the Carcassonne guide—an old mutilé of the Great War. Cynthia herself had twice been round the wonderful old walls with him, so she knew quite well what the others were about to hear; of the ancient old towers, fifty of them, and the ramparts dating back and back to the tenth century, the foundations older even than that, for the Romans had held a fortress here; of the lovely little cathedral of Saint Nazaire, set like a jewel in the heart of the town; all these and more would the visiting Americans see. The small model and his friends must know by heart every syllable of the guide’s lecture, every stone of the city by now. So why need they turn, like a group of little monkeys, just because someone had crossed the square!

“Oh do sit still!” she muttered crossly in French.

The sketch was a good one, the best she had made this week. Now if she could get just the right hue of the shadow on his shoulder. ...

For several minutes the shadow and the mixing of it from her color box held her absorbed. Then an undue amount of chatter, even for a group of small French boys watching an American lady who made the peinture, caused her to glance up again. One of the American tourists had let the group go on without her and had come across to stand behind Cynthia. She was a tall girl, pretty, though pale, with big black eyes and curly dark lashes and a smart American traveling suit of blue and white wash silk. In a low tone she was chatting with the children and with such amazing ease and flourish of idiom that Cynthia, with a pang of envy thought; Canadian ... or Louisiana bred. She’s grown up with the language. Oh darn that model!

“Look here,” she turned to address the visitor. “I wish you’d tell this little devil that I won’t pay him the two francs I’d promised him unless he sits still for ten more minutes. Then he can go. My vocabulary simply won’t stand the strain of putting that forcefully.”

The girl laughed. She had a nice laugh thought Cynthia still slightly resentful of the interruption, then followed a stream of fluent French addressed to the model.

“Mind if I watch?” she asked quietly, and Cynthia, again intent on the color of that shadow, muttered an absent-minded permission. Thereafter for the space of ten minutes there was peace.

Along the old walls of Carcassonne, swimming in the golden haze of afternoon light, pigeons circled and cooed. From a not too distant watch tower came the nasal drone of the guide, explaining how, just here, the Black Prince had stormed the city and burned the tower. The air smelt of hot dust, sleepiness, and France, and Cynthia’s busy brush flew from palette to sketch and back again.

Finally, she leaned back on her stool, squinted at the sketch with her head on one side, then looked up and nodded. “It’s finished I guess. I don’t know what you said to him, but it worked like a charm. Sorry I was rude.”

“You weren’t rude. That’s a lovely painting, and a good likeness too. You’re American aren’t you? My name is Serena Grayson, from New Orleans.” Only she said “O’lean” in the prettiest manner imaginable.

“I guessed it,” grinned Cynthia. “Staying in the Lower Town? Wait till I pay off this infant and we’ll walk down together.”

“I should wait for Aunt Anna,” the girl hesitated. “Look here, let me have a piece of paper from your sketch book, will you? I’ll just scribble a note to tell her that I’ve gone on. She is shopping in the Cité, and started me out with that guide.” Serena made a little face of dislike. “I thought watching you would be more fun, so I deserted, but she’ll be looking for me when the tour is finished.”

Cynthia didn’t say anything but she thought it was strange that a girl, fully her own age, should have to report so carefully on where she was going. Serena dispatched the note by one of the small urchins who still lingered to watch the fascinating process of packing up the paint box. Almost any of them was eager to earn an extra franc. “Though I hope it gets delivered,” remarked Serena, watching the small boy dubiously as he scampered off, “perhaps I hadn’t better go, after all.”

“Oh, come along. It’s just to the Lower Town. Nothing can hurt you and surely your Aunt won’t care. Why I go all over France alone.”

“Do you?” almost wistfully.

The way out of the ancient walled city led down a steep little cobbled street where houses leaned their heads together, like gossips over tea cups, and between whose stones grasses grew and the shadows of the late afternoon flung a welcome coolness. Then out past the tourney court where once gallant knights in full armor had fought for their ladies’ favor, and past the Porte d’Aude, which looked out over the lower and newer ... and uglier town.

“Where are you staying?” asked Cynthia. “Glory, but it’s good to talk to an American again! It’s been weeks since I have been able to.” She hadn’t quite been aware how much she had missed Nancy; had wished that Chick were here until she met someone from home.

“It is jolly to speak your own tongue again. We’re staying at the Chat d’Or, Aunt Anna and myself. We only got here today. And won’t you come and have dinner with us tonight? I’d love to have you.”

“I’d love to come. I’ve been here nearly a week now, and it’s worth every minute you can spend here too. Look!” and Cynthia clutched the other’s arm to turn her attention behind them.

Above the road they had descended, full in the glow of the late sun the city rose, golden pale against the southern sky; turrets and towers, battlements and barbicans, dreaming in the fairy-tale light exactly as they had dreamed for the past six hundred years and more.

“Lovely!” murmured the other, starry eyed. For just a moment Cynthia thought there were tears in her eyes, as well as stars, but she could understand that. Cynthia herself often felt teary when something was too beautiful to believe.

They took up this matter of dinner again. “It will be nice to eat somewhere else, neither of the two places I’ve tried are very good and I’m sick of the boiled veal and caramel custard at the Cheval Blanc,” said Cynthia. “And where the French ever got the idea they were a nation of born cooks! ... I know where your hotel is, suppose I run home now, my road goes this way and yours to the left, then I’ll get a bath and into a clean dress and be at your place ... when? About seven?”

There were three hotels in Carcassonne, one in the upper Cité, very grand and quaint, and with the grandest, quaintest prices too, and two in the lower town across the river Aude. Cynthia had taken a room at the station hotel, which was the first one she saw when she got off the train. It was at least cheap and convenient. Oh yes, and there was the Hotel de l’Universe, hardly worthy of the name of a hotel but displaying its grandiloquent appellation in gilt letters two feet high across its entire three room frontage. Cynthia had smiled at the name, for she had found in France that it was generally the smallest places that bore the biggest names.

The Universe looked cozy and very clean, and she had even thought of moving her suitcase inside its hospitable blue door, but had been too busy to carry out the thought. Often however she dined there and tonight as she crossed the square and passed the little red checked gingham curtains and the green painted iron tables on the terrace, she saw the American boy having a beer on the terrace, just as she had seen him every evening since she came. She smiled and waved a hand at him, and he very nearly smiled in return. Cynthia had an impulse to try once more to talk to him, as she had tried on the train, but immediately his gaze had returned morosely to the long lane of dusty plane trees that lined the street. Oh well, she wasn’t going to waste her time picking up someone who evidently didn’t want to be picked up. But when you travel for miles and miles, and hours and hours in the same railway coach with a chap, and you know he’s a fellow countryman, and hard up probably, like you are ... just look at the clothes he wore; neat, but not any product of Park Avenue, and when there’s scarcely another American in the Lower Town, not at least until today, why it would seem sort of pleasant to meet once or twice and have a talk. Cynthia gave a little skip of pleasure and forgot the boy on the terrace. Nice to have a dinner date, nice to be going to talk good old United States for an evening. Adventure was exciting ... afterwards, but it was pretty dull sometimes while it was happening.

But when she returned along the narrow little street, past the Hotel de l’Universe, with the last rays of the sun gilding the far off towers of the upper city, the boy was still sitting on the terrace. Cynthia wondered.

She had first seen him at Toulouse, standing on the platform with his suitcase in his hand and Cynthia, leaning out of the window to buy a sandwich jambon and a bottle of mineral water from the little pushcart, like a giant baby carriage, that peddles lunches on all the train platforms in France, noticed his very American shoes. She always played little games with herself to ward off boredom, and by this time considered herself quite skillful in telling even Norwegians from English, who looked so much like them.

This boy had ascended further down on the corridor train. Cynthia was riding second class instead of third for it was a long trip from the Pyrenees to Carcassonne. Later in the afternoon she noticed him in the very next compartment, and still later passed him in the corridor, leaning listlessly against the long window. The last time before Carcassonne she noticed him on the platform of a tiny way-station where he stopped to buy a flower from a little girl and for the first time, he smiled. Cynthia was startled at that smile, so white and sudden and flashing. “Why, he doesn’t look cross and unhappy at all!” she thought. “Somebody ought to tell him to smile more often!”

But she hadn’t seen him smile again in all the weeks since then.

It might have been a very happy evening, but for Miss Comstock, Serena’s Aunt Anna. She was a pretty, plump little Southerner, carefully rouged and powdered and manicured, exquisitely dressed, with manners as sleek as the fur of a well tended cat. But her manners didn’t somehow put you at your ease, they just made you feel crude and ill bred by contrast. Miss Comstock’s slow drawl, even more pronouncedly of the south than Serena’s, was as purring as a kitten’s song of content, and she appeared to be intensely interested in all her guest had been and done and seen.

The hotel was much more pretentious than Cynthia’s humble Cheval Blanc, with corridors choked with palm trees and hanging baskets; with delicious food; and with a great yellow cat on the front mat attesting to the excellence of the cuisine. Cynthia thought the cat’s smug countenance bore a fantastic resemblance to Serena’s Aunt Anna, but she wouldn’t have trusted him alone with a canary.

“How wonderful to be an artist, wonderful to do as you like with your life, no cares, no responsibilities, no ties!” gushed Aunt Anna over their coffee on the terrace.

Cynthia rudely thought “Oh yeah,” and remembered the cover she must send back to the States every month and all the other work she had accomplished in Europe, but said nothing.

“You know I always had a fancy to be an artist. But once I had an artist in love with me,” and she sighed romantically.

“Lots of people in love with you, Auntie,” murmured Serena, in so dutiful a tone that Cynthia wondered how many hundred times she had made the same remark.

Someone was playing a violin in the café across the street, the lights and the sound of voices streamed out across the little square beyond the hotel terrace and a big yellow moon swam up behind the plane trees. The streets were full of people coming and going, for tonight was Saturday when all the town felt free to play.

Serena had gone very silent since her last remark and Cynthia, in spite of the beauty of the hour, was beginning to feel sleepy and finding it difficult to stifle her yawns as she watched the shadow silhouettes of people passing, dark against the café lights. It was like a scene in a play. Some of the characters she already recognized from her week in the town. There was good old Madame Brassard, who kept the pastry shop down by the river, leaning plumply on the arm of her thin, gray little husband, and both in spotless black as befitted a gala Saturday night. And there was the guide from the Carcassonne walls, limping on his cane, his face as blankly sweet as a chromo portrait. It had been, Cynthia knew, almost entirely shot away at Amiens, and repaired again by a surgeon who had almost, but not quite repeated the charm of the original. And there was the boy from the other terrace, slouching slowly, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched disconsolately. Some day, perhaps tomorrow morning, she would certainly cross the street and start talking to him. ...

Aunt Anna gave a faint exclamation and leaned forward, blinking against the lights, “Oh, isn’t that ... but no, of course not, how foolish of me!” She gave a nervous little laugh. “I ... excuse me, I thought I recognized someone from home,” she said, and began to tell Cynthia all about the nice man in the shop in the Upper Town who was keeping a lovely silk shawl till she came in to look at it again in the morning.

Serena, sitting with her back to the light, was still silent. Cynthia suddenly jumped to her feet and exclaimed. “Come on, let’s go for a walk up to the walls. It’s a wonderful night to see them, and it’s perfectly safe, there will be lots of people along the road.”

Miss Comstock glanced swiftly down the street, then reached out to pat her hand. “You Yankee girls are so energetic,” she drawled. “I’m sure Serena would much prefer to sit right here and listen to the beautiful music.”

But it seemed Serena wouldn’t. She, too, was on her feet. “We’ll just go a little way, Aunt Anna,” she said, “and we won’t be gone long. Come on, Yankee gal,” and she linked her arm through Cynthia’s.

She laughed and talked animatedly for the next block or two but when they came out of the new town and faced the walls of the ancient fortress, all green and dark gold under the moon, with crickets shrilling from the banks of the little stream and the lights of the houses behind them, she was silent again.

“Let’s not go any farther, here’s a splendid place to sit,” suggested Cynthia, who thought the other might be rather tired, and had found a seat on the handrail of the little stone bridge. One could hear far off music and voices sounding faintly, and contrary to expectations the road was almost deserted. Perhaps the old town had little romance or mystery for those who had always lived within sight of its walls. But she must make conversation; this wasn’t being a good guest.

“Where do you go after Carcassonne?” she asked, politely, then saw, with astonishment that Serena was crying!

“Oh, don’t do that!” cried Cynthia distressed. “Look here, you aren’t happy. Can’t you tell me about it?”

“Oh I hate France, I hate Europe, I hate this town worst of all!” and Serena suddenly flopped down beside Cynthia and dropped her head on a much surprised Yankee shoulder. “I want to go ho ... ome! I want ... to ... go ... ho ... ome!”

“Is it just homesickness?” asked Cynthia gently. She certainly knew a lot about that feeling since she came abroad, but Serena shook her head, then started to wipe her eyes. “No ...” forlornly. “It’s ... it’s Jack.”

“Jack? Oh ... ah ... yes,” murmured Cynthia vaguely. “Come, sit up and tell me all about it,” and she patted the other’s back, reassuringly. She had heard that it was sometimes easier to tell your troubles to a stranger. Serena may have heard that too, for she said:

“It’s Aunt Anna, really. She’s mother’s oldest sister. Oh I know she doesn’t look it, but she’s always had money and can afford to do things to keep young and buy clothes to make herself pretty and I guess that’s about all she cares about anyway. I guess long ago she was in love with Jack’s father, too, though that’s only a sort of guess.”

“Jack?”

“Jack Hemstead. He’s a boy from home,” as though that were sufficient explanation. “And when Jack ... Jack said he ca ... cared for me ...” she swallowed, waited a minute and went on, “Aunt Anna made fun of him, and said it was all foolishness at our age, though I’m eighteen ... and Jack’s nearly twenty one, and finally she said she’d take me abroad for the summer and then maybe I’d see Jack wasn’t so marvelous. But he is, oh he’s the most marvelous person.”

She’d start to cry again if Cynthia wasn’t careful. “But haven’t you written him?” she asked.

Serena nodded vigorously. “Yes, but we had a quarrel just before I left. He said if I really cared I’d marry him then, even if we weren’t of age. But I guess maybe I wanted the trip and I thought I could have Jack too, and I haven’t heard a word, not one single word since I left home. I’ve written and written begging him to write me and I’m so ashamed!”

“Something’s wrong somewhere,” thought Cynthia, wondering what on earth she could do about it. “Tell me more about him? And how long have you been over?”

“Only four weeks and Auntie’s really been awfully kind, in her own way. She’s bought me things and things, and we shopped for clothes till I never want to see another Paris label again. I hated Paris. Then Aunt decided to come to Carcassonne. We are sailing from the south of France. She said she’d once read a poem about it. But you’re the first young person I’ve talked to since we left home. On the boat she was awfully sick and wanted to be read to all the time, so I just stayed in the cabin with her, I was so grateful for the trip. But I didn’t know Jack wasn’t going to forgive me,” she wailed.

Cynthia, looking off towards the walls through the sweet scented moonlight, felt very sorry for this little Southerner. But it all seemed too remote, too far away for her to do anything to help. With Jack in America she couldn’t do anything more than lend a listening ear to Serena and try to cheer her up as much as possible in the few days they’d be staying here.

Serena seemed quite content with that, quite willing, in the days that followed just to trail along with a book or a bit of sewing and sit, not too far off, while Cynthia sketched along the walls of the old city. She proved indeed extremely useful. Her fluent French was a prop for Cynthia’s faltering accents and she had a delightful knack with persuading the children to pose. Cynthia made three excellent portraits, any one of which would do for her monthly cover, then felt free to give her time to sketching the town itself.

But wherever they went Aunt Anna either hovered in the background or knew exactly where they would be from half hour to half hour. It was like having a secret service man always in the offing. Serena didn’t mind but Cynthia said it gave her the creeps, always to have Miss Comstock bobbing up like a cuckoo out of a clock, and put up with it only for the sake of the other girl.

Meanwhile she heard more about this Jack person. She heard about the color of his eyes and of his hair, about his cleverness and about his family and about his job, which was, at the moment, junior clerk, very junior indeed, in a big real estate office in New Orleans.

“He’s got the nicest smile ... you’d think he was cross, really, until he smiles and then it sort of ... flashes across his face,” expatiated Serena. They had been sitting for the past hour in the tourney court, trying to reconstruct the ancient Court of Beauty with its lists; the ground enclosed for the contest, its seats for the great ladies from which the Queen of Beauty was chosen. “I wonder if they called her ‘Miss Carcassonne,’ or ‘Miss France,’” murmured Cynthia to herself.

All was quiet here. One could follow, on the ancient walls, the reconstruction of centuries, the lower bricks of Roman tile, small and flat, the higher coarser stone of the tenth century, then above that, still more careful work of later years and finally the deliberately antiqued and weathered rebuilding of the great Viollet-le-Duc, without whose interest and wealth this greatest relic of the middle ages would not exist today. Birds wheeled in the sunlight above them, but the shadow of the wall was cool and the small herd of tourists, whose voices sounded from the tower above them, scarcely left a ripple on the peace of the afternoon.

“I love this place,” murmured Cynthia splashing happily in rich blue shadow color, but she frowned a little. Something Serena had said a moment back had started her memory working. She didn’t really want it to work, she wanted to stay here and finish her sketch. “That was it though ... ‘it sort of flashes across his face!’”

“This place gives me the shivers,” Serena remarked crossly. “I guess it’s because it’s so full of romance and I ... I feel so empty of it.”

Suddenly Cynthia jumped off the wall and began to gather up her painting materials. She had remembered what she wanted to remember, it was just a chance, the wildest chance possible, but she had to know for sure. “I’m going back to the hotel,” she said. “You stay here, Serena ... but I’d like it if you could come along in a couple of hours and have tea with me. French tea is terrible of course but we can order citron pressé. I may have something to show you too.”

“Just me, without Auntie?” asked Serena.

Cynthia nodded. “Try, for Pete’s sake to get her into a shop for an hour or two, or tell her it’s time she took the tour around the walls. She might enjoy the guide, he was very handsome once,” she added maliciously, “but do come without her.”

“I’ll try. I’ve got to stay here and wait for her anyway. She said she’d be along about two o’clock and it’s only half past one.” And her puzzled dark gaze followed Cynthia down the steep steps to the court, across it, through the high pointed arch of the gate, and long afterwards as she appeared again on the dusty stretch of sunlit road to the lower town.

Cynthia had suddenly remembered that boy at the Hotel de l’Universe, and how flashing his smile had been, that one time she had seen it. But he hadn’t even appeared on the terrace for the past two days, perhaps he had left Carcassonne entirely, and almost certainly he had no least connection with Serena’s Jack, but he had looked so forlorn and somehow he had looked Southern too. Cynthia’s ardent desire to be again a Little Miss Fixit almost persuaded her she could tell a Yankee from a Louisianian even before he had said a single word.

She’d ask at the hotel for the young American with the brown eyes, and if he were still registered there she’d leave a note inviting him to join her for tea this afternoon ... anyway it might be rather fun, even if nothing came of it.

Serena was on time, and Cynthia suggested that the Hotel de l’Universe looked more amusing than the terrace of her own hotel.

“And I’d like to try a grenadine, it’s such a pretty color,” she announced, once settled at the green painted table. So they each had one of the sickly pink syrups so beloved of the French and sat sipping contentedly while they gazed out across the low hedge of dusty box that separated the terrace from the street. Then Cynthia, who was watching her companion, saw her grab the edge of the table and go almost white.

“I was right ... I was right!” thought Cynthia. “Oh Golly!”

“Cynthia!” gasped the other wildly. “Who ... who’s that?”

A tall figure was lounging down the street, coming swiftly towards them. Then he had got Cynthia’s little note, and had come almost as though he had guessed what it was about.

The next happened so suddenly that Cynthia could scarcely untangle it all. A very flushed, happily laughing Serena, different from any Serena Cynthia had yet seen, standing in the entrance to the street, then tearing wildly towards the approaching boy. A meeting of the two, no doubt about its being the right Jack ... and the amused delighted proprietor beaming in the doorway. After all this was Carcassonne, and it was France, where else in the world would one expect to find romance, if not here?

“But how did you guess, how did you guess?” asked Serena, as, introductions properly over they sat again at the little green table. Jack had placed his straw hat and the Tauchniz book he had been carrying on the next table, had ordered a beer, but had made no move to consume it for his attention was too occupied with Serena.

“Oh, we traveled together, once upon a time,” began Cynthia but immediately saw that neither of her listeners was giving her the slightest attention. Wisest to slip away and stand guard outside. “I’ll give you a half hour together, mes enfants,” she said firmly, “but if I give an alarm, you’ve got to scoot! Better get busy and make your plans. May I borrow this?” and picking up the little Tauchnitz paper covered volume, she nodded, and went out through the dusty hedge.

All this was making her feel pretty blue, herself. Chick, also, might have been here today, with a bit of luck. But Chick was a very satisfying person; he, at least wrote letters, and fat ones too. She had had one this morning and while she waited would be a good time to read it again, for the third time.

That finished she found a seat beneath the plane trees and turned to the book she had picked up, a volume of Conrad’s sea stories with Jack Hemstead sprawled in large, plain hand across the cover. She gave the couple thirty-five minutes, then fearing that Miss Comstock, who of course knew where Serena had gone for the afternoon, might happen along, Cynthia got up and briskly returned to the terrace.

Serena’s head was close to Jack’s tumbled locks, and Cynthia was amused to note that their warming drinks stood in the glasses just at the height they had been when she left them.

“Well children, what’s the plans?” she asked pulling out her chair again.

“We’re going to be married.” Serena’s eyes were like stars. “Jack was twenty one last month and he came over on a cattle boat, wasn’t that brave of him? He got a big commission, big for a beginner that is, for selling a business plot in the city, so he decided to trail us over here and see what was wrong. He found out our address from the hotel in Paris. I’ve got a first class ticket home, and Jack has a third class, he thinks we can trade them in for two second class. My ticket’s my own because Mother paid for that, not Aunt Anna.”

“The American consul at Marseilles can marry us,” Jack told Cynthia. “I can’t tell you how grateful we are for arranging this. Serena hasn’t been getting any of my letters.”

“Your aunt?” Cynthia’s eyebrows were questioning and Serena nodded and shrugged. “It’s all right now, but we can’t give her another chance to mess things up for us. Jack thinks we had better get away on the rapide tonight. But I don’t see how I can get away before tomorrow, not without an awful fuss.”

“You’ve got to,” said Jack firmly, already playing the heavy husband. “This is one time when you’ll have to put on some Yankee pep. Your aunt knows I’m here, or at least that I was here for over a week.”

“What!” gasped Serena, and even Cynthia was astonished.

“Yes, she saw me one evening when I was strolling about the streets here, that was, let’s see, about five days ago.”

The night Serena talked to me on the bridge, thought Cynthia ... that’s so, he passed the café where the lights were so bright.

“So a couple of days later she hunted me up at the hotel. She said she had no intention of my seeing her niece and of making her unhappy all over again, and that Serena’s not writing was proof enough that she was through caring for me. That sort of set me thinking, for how could she be sure that Serena wasn’t really writing to me unless she herself was doing something about it.”

“But I did write Jack, two letters every week,” protested the indignant Serena.

“Yes, I know, honey child, but your aunt was very careful that they didn’t get mailed, or that you didn’t get mine either. So I let her come down to the station to see me off. She was most gracious, having won her point. She saw me buy a ticket for Marseilles and get on the express, but she didn’t know that it stops again about a half hour beyond here, and that I got off there and returned by the next train. I’ve been very careful ever since to keep out of sight as much as possible, but I’d seen you two together so when I got Miss Wanstead’s note I suspected that she had arranged something.”

“Oh Jack, and I never guessed you were in Carcassonne all this time.”

For a long moment then they forgot all about Cynthia till in protest that young lady remarked. “Hadn’t we better get on with those plans of yours?”

So for fifteen more minutes plans were made, rejected, and reaccepted, till Cynthia looking up suddenly exclaimed, “And here comes your aunt!”

Tripping gaily down the street on the arm of the little blesse, parasol unfurled, eyes upcast in characteristic admiring pose came Miss Comstock.

“Run, Jack!” gasped Serena. “She mustn’t see you ...” and there was a scramble for the doorway, a hasty return for the straw hat, and at the last minute Cynthia reached out to switch the untasted beer to another table, as though a departing customer had left it there. But it was a close shave.

Aunt Anna was full of the sights she had seen, the new bargains she had procured, of the delightful little soldier who had showed her around, but her eyes were keen and Cynthia knew she did not miss that beer at the next table. Then Cynthia did a clumsy thing, she dropped the volume of Conrad. For just a moment it lay, face upward on the floor, the sprawling signature showing plainly across its cover. Cynthia bent to grab it, hastily flapped it on top her purse, she rose immediately to go, she couldn’t risk the fact that Miss Comstock might have glimpsed that name.

The next two hours were merely a matter of waiting. Serena and her aunt usually dined at eight, and Cynthia, cautiously strolling along the street which commanded Serena’s bedroom window watched for the agreed signal, a handkerchief; pasted against the pane as though put there for drying. She waited five minutes more, then slipped upstairs, repeating to herself the story she would tell if any one tried to stop her. But no one did.

Serena’s room-key hung, in trusting European fashion on a high nail beside her door. Cynthia took it down, glanced once again along the corridor, thought she heard footsteps and hastily turned the key. Inside.

Serena’s bag, already packed, had been slid beneath her bed. Her traveling coat and hat, her street shoes were with it. Cynthia grabbed the lot and opened the door again. Then came a moment of fright, for the maid, Agnés, stood just outside in the corridor. But she was wreathed in smiles, already primed by Serena for the enlévement, the elopement, and her ancient romantic heart was in the job. She piloted Cynthia along the corridor and down the servant’s stairway, then out through an alley behind the garage, put her finger to her lips as a vow of silence, then blew a kiss into the air as a gesture of her best wishes for the bride and groom. No word between them had been passed during the whole four minutes of action. Cynthia, giggling, was on her way. This was certainly something to write home about.

The remainder worked like a charm, a charm of ancient Carcassonne, where, even in the tenth century young ladies must have fled with their heart’s desire. At nine o’clock the rapide for Marseilles stopped for five minutes at the tiny station. At nine minutes to nine Jack with his suitcase, Cynthia with Serena’s belongings and a bunch of flowers for the bride-to-be, watched anxiously down the street. Then against the sunset appeared Serena, breathless, with dusty evening slippers, still in her dinner gown, but happy and incoherent with excitement.

“Oh you treasures, both of you!” she cried. “Have we tickets? ... Goodness, there’s the train already ... She thinks I’m out buying some aspirin tablets ... I didn’t have time to leave a note on the pincushion ... My lamb, will you tell her I’ve gone? ...” and rattled on and on while they climbed into the compartment. Cynthia kept one anxious eye on the door. She didn’t know what would be the proper procedure should Aunt Anna appear at the station with the fire of suspicion in her eye. Cynthia had a wild momentary vision of herself grabbing the woman around her ample waist and hanging on until the train could have pulled out.

But no one appeared. The conductor blew his little toy trumpet, shouted the usual warning, and at the last minute Cynthia still clasping the bridal bouquet had to run beside the carriage to fling it through the window. She had a final glimpse of Serena’s starry eyes, of Jack’s white smile.

Then silence. Nothing.

Cynthia came out of the station door to the deserted cobble street and twilight. “I wish it had happened to me,” she thought a little mournfully. “But maybe it will, soon,” and had no idea how very soon that would be. The moon hung like a burnished platter above the romantic old town, too beautiful, too unreal to be true.

“Well,” thought Cynthia, going practical all of a sudden, “I guess somebody’s got to break the news to Auntie!” And started down the street toward the hotel of Miss Comstock.

CHAPTER 7

Siena

THE RACING SNAIL

Then at Marseilles, where Cynthia had planned to take train for Paris, for Cherbourg and a ship for home, she caught up with her mail. One specially fat and formidable envelope, with many seals, for which she had to sign papers and more papers, proved to contain, of all things, the long deferred check for the capture of Goncourt, the jewel thief.

Cynthia, in the office of Cook and Sons, stood surveying the paper with bright round eyes. So many francs—one thought in francs now, not in dollars—would purchase—what? Presents for home? Her luggage was already heavy with ’em. More clothes in Paris? She had, really, all she needed. A trip to some place farther on? Cynthia nibbled a pink finger tip and thought about that. Maybe never again, after this once, would she get to Europe. Maybe she’d be some day, a long time off, one of those little old ladies with shawls who sit in corners, well out of the draft, and talk with wistful reminiscence of “when I was in France—when I was in Italy.” Meaning of course the one time they were there. Perhaps that wouldn’t be true, perhaps she’d come again in a year or two. But just the same she owed it to herself to get all she could out of this adventure while she was right here on the spot. The thief had proved to be just so many extra francs, dropped by the gods directly into her lap. Shouldn’t she, therefore, take it for a sign, cable home that she was waiting for a later boat, and go on with the adventure?

“When I was in Italy,” the rhythm returned. Cynthia whirled to face the surprised young man behind the counter.

“If you had a windfall of ... so many hundred or thousand francs,” she asked him, “where would you go—from here?”

The young man grinned cheerfully and replied in meticulous English. “Madmoiselle, I should go to Italy.”

“Bon!” Cynthia was enchanted that his advice should agree with her mental toss of a coin. “And where in Italy, please?”

The young man grinned more widely and shuffled the papers on his counter. Here then was a customer for the tickets he had to sell. “Madmoiselle, I should go to the palio in Siena. It is the month for that. Madmoiselle has heard of the palio? Non? Oh, but then——,” and he proceeded to expound.

Twenty minutes later Cynthia, walking on air, emerged from Cook and Sons. In her purse reposed a ticket for Italy. And the palio in Siena would be one of those things she could talk of, once she got to the age of relating, “When I was in Italy.”

Five days later Cynthia, in Siena, pressed her small tip tilted nose flat against the glass of the dusty window, peering in. She had come again, for the third time today to see the frame. The lovely leather frame was right in the foreground propped against the glass, just as it had been yesterday and probably for weeks and weeks before that. Beside it lay other leather things; cigarette cases, glove boxes and portfolios, all beautiful. But it was the frame that interested Cynthia.

It was the one frame in all Siena, which, after all is a city of leather frames, for the photograph of Chick which she had received in the mail in Marseilles. And nothing short of perfection was worthy of holding that picture. In it the face of Chick squarely fronted the beholder, the hair of Chick was fluffy and rumpled, as it had been when the Academy bunch had given him his nickname, the eyes looked straight and truly into the eyes of Cynthia, and the quirky mouth seemed just about to say: “Hi, Cynthia ... Darling!”

The frame was wine colored, the leather as soft as old satin, and all around its edge was a delicate gold border of conventional ivy leaves, with, next to it, a band of oak leaves and tiny acorns, and inside, next to the glass a tiny frail beading. All very simple but it was the color and the workmanship that held Cynthia’s eye.

She sighed. She knew to a lira just exactly what was in her purse, knew that she mustn’t afford the frame, no matter how low the price might be. Nevertheless she pushed open the paint scarred old door in the stone housefront and entered the little shop.

It was, as she had expected, dim and dusty within. The proprietor, an aged little Italian with the down-drooping nose of one who works in delicate detail, was busy with another customer. She also, was an American, small and dainty, expensively clad, older than she appeared. Cynthia smiled to herself. After two months in Europe she knew the type very well.

“Too much, too much!” she was saying, in Italian over and over again, and gestured prettily with a gloved hand toward a small pile of cigarette cases lying on the counter. Unexpectedly then she turned to Cynthia.

“You look as though you could speak Italian, my dear. Do ask him if he will give me a better price for the whole dozen. I want them for bridge prizes, next winter.”

Cynthia was willing to try, and struggled with her scant store of the language. The proprietor shrugged his shoulders and spread expressive Italian fingers wide. “Yes, yes, eight, ten lira less perhaps,” he smiled. And Cynthia knew that all along he had expected to take less than his original price. But the pretty lady was pleased.

“Wrap them up,” she ordered the man, in the loud tone so often employed to the foreigner who seems not to understand, as though by mere volume of sound one could impress one’s meaning.

Cynthia had removed the lovely frame from the window and now held it in her hand. Close like this, it was even more beautiful than when viewed through the wavering old glass, and at Cynthia’s “How much?” the old man smiled almost fondly, as though he too knew this for one of his best pieces. He named the sum in lire and Cynthia made a rapid calculation, then, with a sigh, shook her head and turned to replace it in the window. He might as well have said fifteen hundred dollars, as fifteen. Why, in her tiny room in the pensione she could live for two whole weeks on fifteen dollars. Chick would have to wait, unframed, till she returned to the States and a steady job.

The American lady was still fussing over the wrapping of her package when Cynthia left the shop and stepped out into the street again, one of those steep streets of Siena that seemed to bear always in their sunny stone the tinge of a perpetual sunset glow. From far down the street came the roll of a drum, and Cynthia who had already seen two of these contrade rehearsals pelted off as fast as rubber soles on cobbles could carry her. Never mind the frame, though she gave it a regretful relinquishing thought.

Tomorrow was the Palio, the famous horse race with which Siena, twice a year, for the past four hundred years, has celebrated her liberation from the long arm of her tyrant neighbor, Florence. And now for the past three days Siena had fallen back, body and spirit, into the fifteenth century.

Certainly Cynthia, rounding the corner of the narrow street, felt as though she had been projected feet first into a slice of the middle ages. Banners of silk and of satin, of tapestry and of heavy velvet, fringed and tasseled in gold, embroidered with the arms of some ancient family, hung from a high balcony, and above it, glowing in the warm stone was carved again the heraldic device. Below the slow swaying banners stood a little band of Siennese, two drummerboys in long-hose and doublets, peaked caps over their frizzy locks, their companions two banner-bearers, all in black and white and gold. The flags displayed the arms of their contrada, or ward; this one Lupa, the Wolf, and their huge ruffled sleeves and the little purses which dangled from their belts were embroidered in fine gold with a similar device.

The drums tapped out a strange, intriguing little rhythm while the two banner bearers, practising their rite, did a sort of solemn dance with the great five foot square flags. The object seemed to be to keep up a continual stepping, with the banners never for one moment allowed to lag. Under the arms and up again, out and beneath the dancing feet, and the drums always beating faster and faster. Fascinated, Cynthia watched for the culmination which she knew would come. With a final roll of the drums the banners were flung high, high, almost ... incredibly, to the tops of the houses, then descending, their heavy sticks acting as weights, were caught lightly and skillfully. And the dance, for the moment, was over.

There was a slight cheer from the small group that had gathered to watch and a voice behind her said “Gosh, that was great!”

It was such a shock to hear, in this scene of the past, a good American voice that Cynthia whirled involuntarily to face the speaker. To her surprise he was all of fifty, with the reddish complexion of a confirmed golf player, a shock of nice thick white hair, gray tweeds, the expensive kind, and a panama hat which he wore in his hand.

Cynthia met his smile with one as friendly. “It is nice, isn’t it,” she said, for no particular reason except that one so often does speak to fellow Americans on foreign soil. Then she started to turn away.

“They’re having a prove, in the Piazza del Campo, this morning,” he informed her. “Perhaps you’d like to see that too?”

“Oh are they? Thank you,” said Cynthia, and this time she really did turn away. She had already seen one of the proves, the rehearsal for the big race, and thought she’d prefer, instead of seeing this one, to find a place to sketch. With her final cover off to America she was free now to sketch wherever she pleased, and she had an idea that she might work up material for an exhibition, back in New York. The heads to be her main attraction but perhaps a few landscapes to add a little variety to the show.

That afternoon she saw the man again. She had taken her sketch box and camp stool, and having hired a tiny barouche, was set down about two miles out of Siena where a little old monastery sat atop a tall hill. Here among the cypresses she could sketch for an hour, or two, or three, nibble her apple and sandwiches, and in the cool of later afternoon pack her box and walk back to town.

Cynthia had chosen a shady angle of the wall, and had roughed in her drawing; a bit of a gateway tiled in warm red, and a tall niche where stood a della robbia madonna robed in blue as deep as the Italian sky. Bougainvillea spilled in a fountain of magenta over the wall, and Cynthia was struggling with this riot of color when she heard the clopity-clop of horses’ hoofs, but did not look up. Color dried so swiftly in this warm dry air, one had no time for distractions.

Then there were voices, two, a man’s and a woman’s, the feminine voice light, pleasant, but pitched to a note of amused complaint that was vaguely familiar. Cynthia could not help overhearing.

“Why on earth you had to drag me way out here, Gerald! Oh, of course the road was lovely, but we have so little time in Siena and I did want to get in some more shopping ...”

“Shopping! Always shopping! Don’t you get enough shops in the States?” replied the man’s voice in very husbandly tones.

“Now Gerald, you remember I didn’t really want to come to Siena in the first place, but then of course I had no idea the leather and the iron work was so lovely here.”

Leather, that was it! The woman who had bought the cigarette boxes this morning. And the man with her? Cynthia, absent-mindedly wiping her brush on her white skirt said a faint “Darn!” for the color was rose madder and probably would stain ... peered out from behind her wall. The man was her nice gray haired acquaintance. Well, his trip to the monastery was no business of hers.

Now how to get that tone of sunlight between the deep leaf-shadows? Ah, that did it! Intent on the success of a trick of the trade, Cynthia forgot the voices and when she came out of her corner an hour later there was no one, native or American, in sight. Cynthia took the two mile walk home through a lemon tinted sunset, ran into another flag rehearsal just at the edge of the town and enjoyed it hugely.

So pervasive and insistent was the tap. tap ... tr...r..r..r... tap. tap. of the drums that she seemed, that night to dream about them all night long and she woke the next morning with the distant, dream patter of the rhythm still tapping merrily through her head. In the pale light of early morning the sound was so real she could not banish it with the remainder of her doze and finally hopped out of bed to see if she had been hearing the reality.

Sure enough, just down the street the banner-dancers were practicing their strange little steps, and the first rays of sunlight over the housetops caught the gilded tips of the banner staves as they were flung, in the final flourish of the dance, to the house tops. Cynthia remembered the fourteenth of July celebration in Paris and grinned to herself. She was prepared, now, for such festive spirits. Besides that, and all reports to the contrary notwithstanding, the Italians didn’t seem to put so much noise into their celebrations as their French neighbors. But then they let off more steam in just every-day living.

When she had finished her brief and early breakfast and emerged to the street she saw that this was truly and whole-heartedly a gala day.

The steep cobbled way to the cathedral which crowned the hill was like an illustration clipped from her Morte d’Arthur, a street made ready for the entrance of a Lancelot or a King. Banners of silk and banners of velvet, cloth of gold and cloth of silver, all embroidered with the arms of Siena and her ruling houses, and, so far as Cynthia knew, of Mussolini himself, hung from every upper window and balcony, fluttering in the morning breeze with a constant play of color and pageantry along the gay little street. Every doorway held smiling faces above the garments of this holiday mood. Every child carried a brilliant hued balloon or a whistle, or a small flag. And down around the piazza where the race was to be run the side streets were crowded with tiny bright colored booths, peddling those cheap and sticky indigestibles that go with a holiday all the world over.

Cynthia wanted very much to see the ceremony of blessing the horses that were to run in the race. Only ten of the seventeen wards might compete, due to the tiny race course, and these would be chosen by lot just before the race began. Each horse would be in the little chapel of its own contrada, so Cynthia chose the Snail, since that of all the ward names seemed to appeal to her most. It was so delightfully silly for a Snail to be running a race, even by proxy.

The chapel was a plain little building of warm stone, hidden in the lower edges of the walled town, and the room was already crowded with interested and loyal Snailists, including the horse, who seemed the most interested of all.

Cynthia listened with delight to the sonorous Latin phrases of the little priest, but almost burst into giggles at the horse’s astonished expression when his nose was sprinkled with water from a kind of overgrown silver pepper box. It was an emotional relief when she caught a glance from an amused gray eye, twinkling over the heads of the shorter Sienese and automatically she twinkled back at it. Then she saw a tuft of stiff white hair and recognized her acquaintance of the day before. Cynthia flushed and bit her lip. When she looked again he was gone.

Behind the chapel was a room used for exhibition purposes. Here in the dim glass cases, dusty with age, were the ancient costumes worn in past Palios by the jockeys of the Snail. Many of them were hundreds of years old and all displayed the same careful craftsmanship, the same loving care for detail that Cynthia had noted in the costumes she had seen on the streets.

She made some sketches in her notebook, and went back to the pensione by way of the leather shop to have another look at the frame in the window.

Back in her room she emptied her pocketbook on the bed, and counted her express checks and lire. But the frame was hopeless. She just couldn’t manage it, not even if she asked the shop keeper to come down in his price. The price was fair, Cynthia felt that it was even more than that, and one couldn’t ask a fellow artist to cheapen his wares.

“I’m afraid, Chick darling,” she told the photograph propped between the mirror and the hair brush, “you’ll just have to go as you are. Maybe a little later ...”

For the future looked very bright indeed. Cynthia had already received two letters from advertising firms who were interested in her covers on Little One’s Magazine, and she had an idea for a new series for that same publication, once she was back in the States. But at the moment, in a strange country, with no friend nearer than Nancy and her Mother in Brittany, Cynthia didn’t dare risk fifteen of her precious dollars. Oh dear, it was difficult to be poor, ’specially when Chick needed a frame!

Where at she planted a cautious kiss on the pictured countenance of Mr. Charles Dalton.

The Palio race was due to start at five that afternoon. Cynthia took her sketch book and her portfolio to use as a lap-rest and went off early to find the seat she had purchased three days before. She could spend the time in sketching the crowd—you never could tell; some day she might be called on to illustrate a story about Siena and then her foresight and her sketches would come in handy.

For days the workmen of Siena had been preparing the Piazza del Campo for this event. In the center was a walled off space known as the Dog’s Box, where the poorer people might stand. The race course itself came between this and the tiers of seats raised against the housefronts that faced the piazza; hard, narrow little seats like the bleachers of a ball park. But Cynthia was lucky, for she was on the shady side, and was so interested that she didn’t much care how long she sat there.

Her neighbors were mostly tourists, French, Italians from the south, Germans, a few Austrians, and one or two Americans. Small boys sold bags of nuts, and programs in five languages while the shadow of the bell tower slowly crept across the Dog’s Box and the hard packed earth of the race course. Cynthia noted the mattresses strapped against the bare walls at the four corners of the course, presumably that the horses or riders might not be injured in the scramble around these dangerous places, and learned from her pink leafed program that many of the horses did daily duty through Siena’s streets, pulled cabs, or fruit carts during the year and their owners each belonged to the contrada from which they were chosen to race.

At last the sound of a mortar. The crowd which had been strolling leisurely about the course began to squeeze in under the fence to their places in the box, or scramble, goat-like up the steep tiers of wooden seats. Urged on by the carabinieri, those delightful, self-contained, tweedledum and tweedledee police of Italy, loiterers were soon cleared from the course and way was made for a group of little men, like blue clad gnomes. These, pushing tiny wheelbarrows, swarmed along the roadway. Their job seemed to be to cover with earth any places where the original paving stones might show through.

Then again the sound of the mortar. And here they come!

First the Ensign Bearer of Siena, with the simple black and white flag of the city. Then the Palace Trumpets, the picturesque long trumpets with their pendent banners carried by youthful pages in jaunty velvet caps, slashed doublet and sleekly silken hose. Then the musicians, all in costume and the crossbowmen with their ancient weapons and at last a group from each contrada. In each group a drummer, two flag bearers, a Lord or Captain on horseback in gorgeous armor, of silver, or bronze, or steel beautifully inlaid with gold that glittered in the sunlight. Behind him his squires, his ensign bearers, and on the race horse, the jockey who would ride later, in the race.

Slowly the procession passed around the course. Before the judges’ stand, and four times as they circled the square each group paused that the drummers might perform their little rhythm, that the banner bearers might dance their skillful little steps.

Cynthia sat enthralled. Almost she had to pinch herself to believe it was real. Glorious in color as an old window of stained glass; silks and velvets, knights in full armor, pages, banners and trumpeters, and at the very end the Palio itself, a great banner drawn in a cart, with the staked flags of the contrada around it.

The procession was over. Cynthia sat back and cracked a few nuts and ate them. Just to return to reality for a while, after so much beauty, was a rest and a relief. She had thought so intensely, packed it down so tightly into her memory that no least gesture of it might be forgotten. Even so, she felt as though she would have liked a week of that procession in order to be able to remember it all.

Again the mortar.

The race was about to start. Ten restive little horses ranged behind a rope, ten jockeys struggling to keep them in line. The sound of the gun. They’re off!

Panting, scrambling, hurled against the Dog’s Box, cutting corners, they tore around the course, and the piazza was one vast shout as though from a single throat. Cynthia, on her feet like the rest, stamped and clapped and shouted with the others. The Snail, the little brown Snail was among the leaders. Once around the course. Three times was the extent of the race. And the starting post was in sight again. But one rider was off—which was it?

The Snail’s! Cynthia could have sobbed aloud with despair, with disappointment. Her favorite, out of the race because without a rider. Someone had raised a whip and the Snail’s jockey had been the victim.

Oh well, so much for that! Cynthia, disgusted, almost sank back to her seat, but the mass of excitement around her was too strong to resist. The Snail, for some reason, seemed still to be a favorite, his name rose again and again from surrounding throats. Stubbornly he kept to the track, came to the first of the tiny streets that turned off, away from the race track. Gallantly he resisted temptation, clung to the course. Past the next alley, past the next street, and well among the leaders still. Pulling ahead now, faster and faster, because riderless, guideless. The Snail caught up with the horse of the Eagle, passed him, caught up with the horse of the Owl, hitherto the leader. The Owl’s rider plied whip with vigor, but he was a husky youth, quite a burden for the Owl’s little horse to carry. And the Snail was half a head in the lead as the goal post was passed for the second time.

“Oh come on ... come on!” Regardless now of the fact that the horse was riderless, Cynthia wanted only that he should make the circle the third time. Successfully.

Now he was well in the lead, past the wicked flail of the Owl’s malicious rider. Nothing now could stop him, though as he approached for the third time the steep street leading up into the town Cynthia held her breath lest this time he should leave the course and gallop up it. Held her breath so that she was completely unconscious of the broad shoulders in front of her which her eager hands were grasping.

For an instant the pony faltered. Then urged on by the pounding hoofs behind him passed the last temptation. And was on the final stretch for the goal post.

Faster. Faster! A length, two lengths, three lengths ahead. Cynthia shouted wildly, pounded a fist on the harris tweed shoulder and yelled with the others. “Go on ... Snail ... go on! ... Go on! ... Home! ... Ah..h..h!”

The race was over. “And quite fitting that it should have been won by the Snail,” dryly remarked the owner of the harris tweed shoulder.

Cynthia came out of her daze and gaped at him. It was the nice twinkley man she had seen in the chapel this morning, the one who had come to the monastery with his wife.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she gasped, feeling very hot and red in the face. “Did I pound you to a jelly? Races are pretty exciting, aren’t they?”

“They certainly are,” he agreed cheerfully. “And that was a most surprising one.”

“Do you suppose he really won?” asked Cynthia, carefully following the man down the steep narrow steps. “I don’t imagine it will be allowed like that, without a rider, will it?”

The man laughed. “Well, this is Italy, you know, and after all they may figure it was a race for horses, not jockeys. And the horse certainly came in ahead. But let’s go and find out,” he suggested. “By the way, my name is Lewis, though I believe we have met before, even if you didn’t know my name.”

“How do you do, Mr. Lewis. I’m pleased to meet you I’m sure,” stated Cynthia with mock primness. “And now that’s over, we’re both from the States, I gather, and my name is Wanstead. Didn’t your wife come to the races?”

Mr. Lewis shook his head. “If it had been Longchamps, or Saratoga ... But she wasn’t interested in a little Italian hick town race. Oh, here we are, and I imagine there’s little doubt about the winner.”

The rose-and-gold Snail jockey, wreathed in flowers and comically suggestive of an ancient Greek statue, a blood stained handkerchief as additional decoration about his forehead, was being carried high on the shoulders of a dozen competitors for the honor of the burden. Around him surged a horde of shouting friends and at least a score of pretty girls tossed jests and languorous glances toward the victor.

“I think they ought to be carrying the horse up there,” was Cynthia’s objection. “The jockey didn’t do anything but tumble off.”

“That in itself seems to have been a feat not without its perils. How about some tea up here, to celebrate that our horse won?”

Over the tea cups, in the ancient palace now transformed into a tea shop, over delicious tiny cakes, sweet with honey, deep with frosting, Cynthia heard about Mr. Lewis. Heard that long ago he, too, had been an art student and had come to Siena, heard that he had come back this time, a successful broker, to try to recapture some of the enchantment of that far off time. “But it’s not the same,” he said sadly. “How about some more tea?—No?—Then some more cakes—oh, just one more.”

“Well, maybe, just one.” Cynthia chose a cake like a little Italian palace, all tiled with lemon peel and crowned with a candied cherry. “And do you know the lovely old monastery at the top of the hill?”

“I should say I do. I made a sketch of that, years ago—before you were born, young lady.” Why did people always lay such emphasis on one’s lack of age? “But my wife didn’t think much of it, and perhaps it wasn’t very good, really. Anyway it got lost once when we were moving.”

His smile was slightly rueful and Cynthia forgave the remark about her youthfulness. “It was of the gate, and a lovely old Della Robbia madonna. I went out to see it again, just yesterday, but couldn’t find it.”

“Why, I found it, and did a sketch of it too,” Cynthia blurted out, and a moment later wished she hadn’t. It was obvious that he had been dragged away before he had had time to do much exploring.

“Did you? Oh, could I see it perhaps? But first won’t you have another cake, some more tea?” urged the hospitable Mr. Lewis.

“I couldn’t eat another cake if I knew it was the last one in Siena,” protested Cynthia. “And I think I’ve got the sketch right here. The portfolio made a good rest for my sketch book.”

So there in the tea shop, cool and quiet and growing a bit dim as the sun sank behind the towers and tiles of Siena, Cynthia hauled out her sketches. There were some of the crowd she had made just this afternoon, of the carabinari, heads gravely bent, two by two, always two by two, white gloved hands folded behind their solemn backs.

“You have quite a knack for caricature,” commented Mr. Lewis, and Cynthia said, “You have to, if you are going to do portraits. A really good likeness always holds a little exaggeration.”

At which he nodded understandingly. Nice to be showing your sketches to another artist.

“And here are some of the landscapes I’ve done around Siena, mostly bits of streets and old tiled houses. They aren’t as good as my people.”

“And here is your madonna,” she cried, hauling out the drawing she had finished the day before. She told him about her plan to have an exhibition of the heads and of the landscapes together.

“That’s a good idea too,” he agreed, and propped the little sketch of the monastery against a chair and sat back to squint at it.

“I wonder,” he said at last, “if you’d be willing to make a sale before you go home. I have a fancy to own this one,” and he nodded towards the little tiled gateway. “Could you part with it, do you think?”

Cynthia hesitated. She did sort of want to show that one to Chick and hear his approval. But perhaps tomorrow she could go back to the same place and make another, even a better one.

“We..ll, yes,” she agreed reluctantly. “I might.”

And then came the “How much?” which she had dreaded. Cynthia knew the value, at least the commercial value, of her portraits. But the landscapes were different. They were just studies, perhaps not worth anything at all. “Would ... would two dollars be too much?” she asked. “Or maybe three?”

“My dear child!” protested Mr. Lewis, and Cynthia laughed.

“Well, give me what you like. It will be all right anyway.—Oh, American money, how nice to see it again!” And it was quite a roll, too.

She took the two bills and handed over the painting. “Better take along this cardboard, it’s just the back of the pad, but it fits, and will keep the sketch from being crumpled. And now I really must run. I promised a little English girl at the pensione that I’d have dinner with her tonight and tell her all about the palio. She couldn’t afford a ticket for it. I know she won’t at all approve of the way it turned out. ‘Most unsportin’ my deah!’” she laughed, mimicking the other’s accent.

“Goodbye,” waved Cynthia from the doorway. Nice Mr. Lewis. It had been fun, the tea, and such an appreciative audience—and the two dollars. She opened her purse, just for the comfort of seeing good United States greenbacks again, shook them out of the rumple and gazed at them, startled. Not two one dollar bills, but two for ten dollars each. Twenty good bucks! Oh gosh ... oh glory ... oh joy!

“Miss British Isles can wait,” said Cynthia aloud to the deserted street and turned rapidly in a direction opposite to the pensione. She knew somehow that her luck would hold, her marvelous luck of the day, and that even as late as this sunset hour, with the rosy housefronts of Siena still holding their perpetual sunset glow, the little man in the frame shop would still be there.

Chick that night was no longer propped limply, somewhat forlornly, between the dusty, green tinged mirror and the box of cold cream, but smiled gaily, resplendently, festively, in a frame of wine colored leather with a border of acorns and gold beading.

Cynthia bent over and bestowed a brief kiss on the chilly glass.

“Hi, Chick ... Darling,” she laughed. And turned off the light.

CHAPTER 8

Venice

ALL IS NOT LOST

Cynthia was sleepy when she stumbled into the station at Genoa. She hadn’t been too sure that the hotel keeper would wake her in time to get the train for Venice. So all night long she had dozed fitfully, waking to sit bolt upright and flash on the light to see her watch, then finally been waked from a sound sleep at five, just an hour before train time by the sharp summoning knuckles of the garçon on her bedroom door.

And it must have been because her eyes were still blurred with sleep that she took the rapide instead of the express for Venice. They were standing directly opposite each other, and both of them had “Venezia” in letters a foot high along the carriages. An Italian rapide does not necessarily move with great rapidity. By the best of expresses it is a long day’s journey across the width of Italy and by the time she had discovered, with the half dozen native phrases that she knew, that she had taken the wrong train it was too late to do anything about it. They were already an hour east of Genoa.

“What time do we get to Venezia,” she begged. “Venezia ... Venezia. ...”

“Si...si...si...si...si,” hissed the beaming conductor as he punched her ticket.

“Yes, but what time? Tempo? Tempo?” she pleaded.

The conductor shook his head and shrugged. Probably mad, this pretty signorina. But he had no English, and what did she in third class, in that expensive dress of real silk, with leather shoes upon her feet, a hat, and a suitcase also of veritable leather? He gave it up and sauntered down the crowded aisle between the wooden benches to examine the biglietto of a wizened little great-grandmother traveling, with six great-grandchildren, to Milan.

Cynthia grinned and settled philosophically against the frame of the open window. Ten hours was a pretty long time, and it would be more than that now in this poky old train, but anyway it was an adventure and all part of traveling. She was certainly going in the right direction, there was no one to meet her at the other end, no one to worry when she didn’t arrive, and she would have all day to observe and to make sketches.

Third class had been almost a necessity, this Italian trip hadn’t been allowed for in her original budget, but Cynthia had found third class in France so much more fun than second ... and of course even the Italians say that no one but rich, rich Americans and officials who travel on passes ever go by first. This was the coolest carriage too, since the always open windows let in floods of air and sunlight along with the floods of dust, and the hard wooden benches were pleasantly free of the small insect life almost universally inhabiting the upholstery of first and second coaches.

But third class in Italy! The young man at Cooks who had sold her her ticket had almost expired to hear of an Anglo-Saxon traveling in so unorthodox a fashion. No one ... no one ever traveled third class in Italy! Cynthia surveyed the coach and chuckled again.

Further down the aisle, two lovely little Sisters of Santa Chiara, in the soft, dove-gray habit of their order, with spotless wide-spreading winged headdresses and speckless collars munched contentedly and daintily on bread and cheese augmented by a bottle of water they had brought with them. Cynthia’s eye took in the angle of that tilted, sail-like headdress, stealthily her fingers groped for sketch-book and pencil. A moment later she was so absorbed in her drawing that she absent-mindedly grinned back in friendly fashion at the littlest Sister, who had caught her drawing. Nobody seemed to mind being sketched in this country.

Then there was the old great grandmother and her boisterous brood. Beside them she tended a hen in her apron, a hen that seemed very content to sleep and to cluck drowsily in the warm depths of that blue lap. The littlest bambino was not more than a year old, sleeping with bobbing head on the shoulder of the oldest sister. He had the most beautiful hands, tapering, with tiny dimples and wee pink nails, which fell into enchanting poses. Cynthia sketched happily.

People came and went from every tiny station and crowds gathered and dispersed beneath the trailing potted flowers that decorated the pillars of every station platform. Cheerily they screamed “Buon giorno!” “Addio!” “Arrivederci! Arrivederci!” Italian, someone had told Cynthia, was a language intended to be shouted.

The sun grew warmer, the paper beneath her hand sticky with perspiration. Somewhere along the line a few lire purchased a sandwich of garlic-flavored sausage between thick slices of warm bread, a bottle of warmish water and a bunch of sweet, very juicy green grapes. After lunch she curled in her corner and slept.

When she awoke the car was nearly empty and they were clattering and banging through the light of midafternoon. Hills were purple beyond hot haze and vineyards, white with dust, spread for miles and miles on either side the track. Cynthia sighed and got up to walk the length of the car and back again. Where were they now, she wondered?

When they stopped with a clatter and bang at the next station she hopped out to look at the map hung on the station wall. Keeping one careful eye on the train lest it slide out and leave her, she estimated the probable time that it would reach Venice. Good gracious, it was hours away yet! And at the rate this train was going ...

The little horn tooted its warning and Cynthia fled back to her seat. What to do, what to do? Thank goodness, nobody would be at all worried or put out by this fool mistake of hers. Nancy, back in Brittany by now, and Mrs. Brewster were the only people that knew about her trains and her plans. Mother had insisted when Cynthia first left America that she keep in touch, close touch, with some one person in Europe, and she had been awfully faithful about that. She had even written Nancy what train she was taking from Genoa ... and now, Cynthia grinned ... look at the darn thing!

By five o’clock she was ravenous and very weary. From former experience she knew that she could hop off almost any place that the train might stop and continue next day on the same ticket. But for hours they had not passed a decent sized town, just little settlements about the usual tiny church and inn, a few donkeys and a mangy yellow dog or two. Did she dare get off just anywhere and risk what she might find, or should she stick on here till seeming doomsday, till midnight anyway and arrive at some weird hour on the unknown canals of Venice?

Fumbling in the pocket of her silk jacket she found a single lira and on impulse flipped it into the air. It dropped into her lap and she covered it quickly with her hand.

“Heads; I’ll get off at the very next stop, no matter if it’s in the middle of a field. Tails; I’ll go on to Venice, no matter how late we get there or how hungry I am,” she said aloud.

She uncovered the coin. Heads it was!

Cynthia was a little scared. But determined, oh very determined. Resolutely she took down her suitcase from the rack, swung her painting box beside it. Firmly she waited by the open window till the train banged again to a stop beside a little shack that served as a station. The sign read Santa Maria Something-or-other, a name which meant nothing to Cynthia. Sturdily she stepped backward down the three steep steps to the ground, swung her box and suitcase off beside her and turning her back on the poky little train walked toward the gate.

“Tomorrow ... tomorrow morning I go to Venice,” she explained to the gatekeeper who was punching lacework patterns into her ticket. “Domani. Comprendo?”

“Si, si.” Wonderingly he let her pass. Not until the gate had closed firmly did Cynthia feel sure that she herself wouldn’t turn and race toward the departing train, the train that eventually must reach Venice.

When the last shriek of the whistle had died along the echoing hills, when the last smudge of smoke had disappeared against the dazzling light of the sinking sun, Cynthia was plodding almost ankle deep in dust along the wide path that seemed to do duty as the town road. But there was literally no town here. Far off across the plowed fields a sugar white tower reared against the skyline; the village church. Four or five scattered houses with the inevitable grape vine, their whitewashed sides stained verdigris green with arsenic spray, and a tiny inn to which the gateman had directed her. This latter was her objective.

Its entrance was beneath a vine covered lattice and its bare dirt floor, its collection of dogs looked much like the other farmhouses. But inside there were several tables and a girl behind a counter. She slid forward and smiled shyly with a flutter of incredible lashes. Cynthia felt reassured.

Stumblingly she asked for a room for the night, explained her wish to be called early for the first train for Venice.

Yes, signorina, there was a room, but one. The signorina should regard it.

It was bare, save for the bed, table and chair and directly above the café, but clean and cool. Cynthia nodded, did not ask the price and letting her suitcase slide to the floor, ordered water with which to wash. That was easy, one always asked for water. Supper also should be simple, since a traveler was expected to desire food. Cynthia thought of her first night in Paris and felt a little proud of how much more confident she had become since then. What would Chick think of this adventure of hers, she wondered and was glad he needn’t know about it for weeks yet. He’d be sure to scold her for taking such a risk.

It proved however to be no risk at all. At supper, a simple meal of spaghetti, a salad and grapes, she was examined shyly by several children, hopefully by several dogs, curiously by the adults of the family. But the spaghetti was delicious and Cynthia was hungry. After dinner she was far too sleepy to do more than take a short walk down the quiet dusty road. Back in her room she wedged a chair under the latch of the lockless door and fell asleep almost before she could think again what an adventure this was.

The express from the north, to which Cynthia transferred a half hour beyond the little village, arrived in Venice about nine o’clock. It looked, she thought as she waited in the train corridor, just a little disappointing, only a long, tunnel-like train shed. No canals, no gondolas, no palaces in sight.

The burly Italian in front of her swung off with his bags, Cynthia prepared to follow, and stopped stock still, midway of the top step.

“Chick!”

“Cynthia,” came the excited reply, “Where on earth? ...”

“I ... I thought you were in New York, Chick!” And stood gaping with open mouth until a large bag prodded her, not too gently, in the middle of her back. Then she swung down the steps and dropped suitcase and paint box to fling herself into the arms of the surprised young man. Almost, it seemed, as surprised as she was.

“I thought you were due last night, on the rapide from Genoa,” exclaimed the disgusted Chick. “You wrote that to Nancy you know. And I’ve been meeting trains almost all night. ... It was only by luck I stopped here. I was meeting the express from Genoa on track six ten minutes ago.”

He signaled a porter. “This your stuff? All of it?” A hand beneath her elbow, impersonally, kindly, almost as though he were the favorite nephew of a maiden aunt, all concern for her baggage, that she pass the dogana, the local custom house, that she give her ticket to the proper uniformed official. They came out of the stone doorway onto a half dozen steep stone steps. Before them shimmered the canal. So the popular report was true and Venice did have them?

“I’ve got a gondola waiting right here ...” he looked along the bobbing, yelling line of gondoliers who shouted their wares and virtues below the quay. “Dash that fellow ...” she heard him mutter. “Oh well, never mind Cyn, we’ll take this one,” and still with that air of a nephew-who-expects-to-be-well-remembered-in-the-will, piloted her down the step.

The wide upholstered seat was very comfortable. With surprisingly little fuss they were in the center of the stream, Chick had given the order, his fingers caught hers and held them tight. Good, then they really were still engaged! Cynthia chuckled happily.

“I can’t ...” she turned to gaze at him ... “can’t get over this Chick. It’s the greatest surprise of my life.”

“That was the intention,” Chick grinned back. He had, he told her, arrived in Naples two days ago, had promptly wired Nancy to find Cynthia’s exact address and had been told of the train she would take to Venice.

“Neat, very neat!” approved Cynthia. “If I just hadn’t taken a local by mistake. And now where are you taking me?”

“Pensione Casa Petrarca?”

She nodded, Yes, that was where she had reserved a room.

“Had your breakfast? Good. Then wash and tidy up and we’ll do a bit of sightseeing. After that. ...” Quietly he slipped his hand from hers, slid it into his pocket.

“Oh dear, Chick, what’s the matter, what is it?”

“I’ve ... that is I seem to have. ...” And with the maddening masculine manner of one blessed with many pockets started fumbling through them all, one after another.

“Lost something?”

Chick frowned. “Gone. But I hope it’s not lost.” Deliberately he went through the whole lot again while the gondola rocked gently before the steps of the pensione. At last he shrugged. “I came out last night and this morning with a gondolier named Luigi, from the traghetta, that’s a sort of gondola taxi-stand, across the way. If I’ve dropped the thing, it’ll probably be in his gondola. Go on up, will you? I’ll see if I can trace him.”

A big airy room with a quaint porcelain stove in the corner. As the door closed behind the porter, Cynthia dropped into a chair and dragged off her hat. She didn’t know whether to weep or to laugh. Was she, or was she not, engaged to Chick? He hadn’t mentioned it, he hadn’t acted like it. She decided to laugh and felt better. Washed her face, ran a comb through her curls and felt better yet.

A bit of powder, some rouge and she was ready to meet the world again, or at least Venice and Chick. He was waiting for her by the pensione steps.

“Know any Italian?” he asked anxiously.

“Not much, I’m afraid, Chick.” But, she thought, probably more than he did.

“Well, come see if you can make anything out of this jumble of talk. I’m about cuckoo. We’ll walk across, it’s a good chance to see the Rialto bridge.”

This was of stone, lined with a shallow, stepped, series of shops on either side, going up, going down till one reached the farther side of the Grand canal. Here Chick pointed out the row of gondolas as the taxi-rank from which he had taken Luigi.

Cynthia stammered a few questions, listened to the voluble replies and managed to make out that Luigi had gone some where with a sightseeing party, probably to one of the islands. He’d be back later in the day.

“This morning?” asked Chick anxiously.

“I guess so.” Cynthia was slightly careless about that. Funny of Chick, not like him to make such a fuss over some silly little souvenir he’d bought. “Come on,” she put a hand on his arm, “let’s go sight-see for a while.”

Somewhat reluctantly Chick agreed. Over tiny crooked stone bridges they went, along quays along whose mossy sides the water lapped dark and mysterious, down blind, colorful alleys where small children stuck their heads from windows and yelled shrilly. “Non passaggio ... no passage!” Cynthia adored it all, adored being with Chick again.

If he only wouldn’t fuss so, she thought. For he kept looking at his watch, glancing back over his shoulder, until finally she gave it up in despair. No use of sightseeing till Chick recovered his lost property.

“How about going back now and having another try at your gondolier?” she suggested.

He was so grateful that she was almost ashamed of her impatience, and they turned back immediately. But there was no further news; Luigi had not returned. Desperately Chick started to ask questions, perhaps one of the other gondoliers had heard Luigi speak of a package he had found?

Cynthia, first on one foot and then on the other, for she was getting a little tired, translated to the best of her ability. Chick stuck in a word now and then.

“Perdita. ... Lost ... lost.” Was Chick’s gender wrong, or had he really mislaid a blonde?

But a few in the group of gondoliers got the idea. Apparently each one had, at one time or another discovered something perdita. From beneath the flea-infested blanket of a gondola was produced a dogs-eared magazine. Cynthia beginning to be amused read the lurid title in flaming vermilion sprawled across its cover. “True Tales of the Wild West.” The date was over a year ago but it had been, undoubtedly, once lost.

Other gondoliers left their bobbing craft, passers-by drew closer as Chick’s eagerness held promise of rich reward. Waving the magazine aside he chanted impatiently, “Piccolo ... piccolo,” while he made gestures of small measurement with his hands. Then aside to Cynthia, “that does mean ‘little,’ doesn’t it? Not a musical instrument?”

Cynthia nodded silently, not daring to risk speech and watched with dancing eyes while Chick refused, from a second cheerful brigand a musty, torn golash.

Cheerful brigand number two was a sheer loss to high pressure salesmanship. Cynthia caught the word “Impermeabile ... waterproof,” as he covered the tear with one big hand. Twisting the rubber inside out he sought to display its amazing suppleness and elasticity while an admiring group applauded both at the golash and the salesman, with ohs and ahs of astonishment. Cynthia was wondering how a single torn rubber had been brought from so many thousand miles to lie forgotten in a Venetian gondola, and also how the gondolier thought Chick, with a foot obviously many sizes larger, was going to use it. But perhaps he surmised a sentimental attachment.

She glanced at Chick. Poor darling, this was awfully important to him, and it was mean of her to take it all so lightly. But he was being pretty darn solemn and masculine. Impatiently she said. “If you’d only tell me what it is, Chick, perhaps I could make them understand.” Oh dear, how annoying men could be!

Chick seemed not to hear. The new distraction was a cabbage, wilted, but unquestionably of more recent vintage than either the galosh or the ancient magazine. Its discoverer had waited for a time outside the magic circle, while firing forth a rapid stream of “Ecco ... ecco ... ecco!” as he held aloft the proffered vegetable. Breaking through at last he encountered the two previous presenters of articles, thus gaining the attention also of the crowd. Which was his downfall.

An old woman, black shawl over her head, flattened slippers of magenta felt upon her feet, having heaved her way through by sheer force of language, not only wanted a cabbage, but the cabbage. Perhaps it was the cabbage of her childhood, perhaps she had nursed it from a tiny seedling, this dejected thing. For a moment longer Cynthia listened, then screwed up her face and clapped frantic hands to ears. Couldn’t they get out of this soon?

Close behind the old woman came shouldering two calm carabinieri, just in time it seemed to prevent a general combat. White gloved hands behind them, patent leather hats set squarely above unruffled brows, two identical, magnificent examples of the Venetian police. Tweedledum, it seemed, asked the questions. Tweedledee answered them. Conversely Dum asked and Dee answered. Comparative silence settled upon the circle and Cynthia cautiously removed her hands from her ears.

All available witnesses began to present their evidence. As there were perhaps a score in number all acting out their theories in violent pantomime, Cynthia began to wish they weren’t right in the center of it. The one who had taken upon himself the part of the inquirer after lost articles, Chick’s rôle in fact, was losing things in all directions with wide, dramatic sweeps of his arms.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee executed a half turn in perfect unison, raised right hands in gloves of immaculate whiteness in formal salutation and in Chick’s direction. By now, Cynthia knew them of old, they would have come to an unshakable conclusion. If they awarded the galosh to the old lady, the cabbage to Chick, both parties would have to be content. But no, they had another plan.

The cabbage was bestowed upon its rightful owner who still lingered, voluminous with words, to see what else might happen. The golash returned to the gondolier in whose craft it had originally been found. Cynthia applauded the decision, then translated for Chick’s benefit Tweedledum’s speech:

“We’re to go to the police station, Chick. That’ll teach you, young man, not to start riots. And I hope it does!”

Behind them an admiring and still unsilenced throng applauded their departure, even followed a short distance along the quay and over the ancient bridge.

“My heavens!” fumed Chick, “can’t they understand! I’ve said ‘perdita,’ and ‘piccolo’ till I’m black in the face.” But Cynthia was enjoying herself.

“If you’d tell them a little more,” she soothed, slipping her hand into his arm. “Or if you’d even tell me. ... What in the name of Agatha have you lost, anyway?”

The police were speaking again. Cynthia thought she caught the word. ... “Fondere.” Did that mean “found?” The Lost and Found Department perhaps? She made that suggestion to Chick.

A few more streets, a bridge or two, a narrow sun-lit way and one of the innumerable palaces which seemed now to be a police station, with the crown and arms of Italy above the door. Beyond this a damp and cheerless room, none too clean and the equivalent of a desk sergeant who drew towards him a large book and set down their names, Chick’s and Cynthia’s, and their pensione. Dum and Dee were doing all the explaining but in Italian far too rapid for Cynthia to follow. It might yet prove that she and Chick had defied municipal authority by starting a barter shop on the quayside, one decaying golash for a wilted cabbage.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee had finished, the man at the desk made a gesture. An attendant opened a door, flung back a huge iron grill that closed off about half the room behind it and signed for them to enter. Cynthia clutched at Chick’s arm. Oh dear!

Frankly uncertain she followed Chick’s slow steps, the attendant close behind, Dum and Dee bringing up in the rear. Then the attendant switched on a light, a series of lights disclosing what might have been a wine cellar. But instead of wine ... Cynthia choked back her laughter and pointed.

A bicycle, a shelf of gloves, a regular store of ancient umbrellas and sunshades, piles and piles of books, mostly Baedeckers by their moldy red bindings, boots, odd bits of clothing, a coffeepot, market loads still knotted in capacious handkerchiefs, a coffin, a load of bricks. ...

Chick’s face was flaming. “How in the name of goodness can we tell whether it’s here or not!” He turned to Cynthia. “Don’t they have a list of things somewhere, and the times they were found? Tell them it’s small, small. And done up in white paper and a box.”

“I know,” Cynthia nodded solemnly. “A pound of butter, Chick dear. Oh Chick, you weren’t going to ask me to set up housekeeping were you?” But at the hurt expression in his eyes her levity dimmed. “I’ll tell them you lost it last night, is that it?” And turning to Dum and Dee, carefully choosing her words, she managed to convey the idea.

One of them gave a shrug of disappointment which was echoed by the other. With all these things to choose from, they seemed to say, surely any but the most captious would be satisfied. But they turned to discuss the matter with the attendant. Lights began to go out, indication that this particular exhibition was over, Finish. But apparently more was to follow. Chick might yet discover his pound of butter.

As they returned to the main room the attendant departed and polite gestures demanded that Chick and Cynthia should take chairs and wait. An air of expectancy hung above the little room. Obviously the choicest gem of the collection, something too valuable to be left with the other articles had been sent for.

“Do you think they’ve sent to the bank?” asked Cynthia.

Chick brightened at the suggestion, brightened until the door swung open again. There entered behind the attendant a woman, slatternly, down at heels, very cross and carrying a basket on her arm. Slowly, reluctantly she advanced to the desk, lifted the cover of the basket. At the summons of the sergeant Chick appeared beside her. With a wild burst Dum and Dee grabbed the basket from the woman, thrust it into Chick’s reluctant arms. Whereat the basket, considerably disturbed, let out a long neck, green mottled with brown feathers, a wide open yellow beak, an indignant eye and a stiffly upstanding comb of violent red. Loudly the occupant of the basket protested with a violent “... C ck ... a ... doo ... dle ... do!”

Chick nearly dropped the basket.

Cynthia, nearly helpless with laughter, had fallen into a chair and, with face buried in her handkerchief, could only indulge in what Dum and Dee must surely have considered tears of uncontrolled joy at this return of her lost property. Sympathetic murmurs, croonings of consolation echoed about the room. Even the rather hard faced woman was touched. Chick stood stupidly staring.

The hardest part of the day came when Cynthia, drying her streaming eyes, was forced into sufficient sobriety and Italian to explain that indeed and indeed the rooster, and it was a beautiful rooster, oh a magnificent rooster, was not theirs. Was not at all what they sought.

“No, no, no, no, no!” Like a popgun, Cynthia shot out violent negatives. And at last she had made it clear. Almost with joy the woman received back the cherished rooster from Chick’s relieved embrace. Almost haughtily they were shown to the door, sent, with an air of extreme disapproval, upon their way.

Outside in the sunlight Cynthia was almost surprised to find it was the same day, and Chick pulled down his coat, let out a great puff of a sigh.

After that first burst of laughter Cynthia had managed to get control of herself, but she wasn’t sure how long this would last. She must get somewhere, anywhere, and have it all out with Chick. Meekly she took his arm, let him lead her along the quay, through small streets toward the Piazza San Marco. She glanced upward. Chick was being very masculine, very stern, one might almost think, unforgiving.

In silence they traversed the small streets. Well, if Chick was going to be stuffy! ... But he couldn’t be, he simply couldn’t be. And whose beastly old bundle was it anyway? She didn’t go about leaving things in gondolas.

Florio’s, on the Piazza San Marco. A small green iron table, two small twisted iron chairs and an attentive waiter in a white apron. Chick’s eyes consulted Cynthia, then ordered two lemonades. They came. In silence Cynthia sipped hers, bit her lips, gulped and regarded fixedly a stupid, pink toed pigeon who was strutting, with puffed out chest before the lovely little faun colored lady of his choice. Sideways out of her eyes Cynthia caught a glimpse of Chick, then turned to face him.

His face was red but in his eyes was now a glimmer of understanding, one might almost say mirth. Cynthia dared a slight, tremulous giggle, forerunner of the gale to come. Then. ...

“Oh Chick, Chick, if you could have seen yourself with that silly rooster. ... And the cabbage ... and Tweedledum ...!”

The tide had risen now, all bars were down. Rocking with mirth they clung to the little iron chairs and laughed and laughed. A moment’s pause to recount the pomposity of the attendant, the old woman with the cabbage, the galosh, the list of things in that storeroom. Did you see the bicycle? ... Who could have left those high, buttoned shoes? ... Oh, and the fans, simply stacks of them!

For ten minutes the gale raged backwards and forwards then, weak and helpless Cynthia begged for another lemonade, wiped the tears from her eyes and subsided into comparative sanity. Their laughter together had relieved her in many ways. It was going to be all right now, she and Chick still thought alike, could still find amusement in the same things, and the doubts of the morning were all swept away.

“But Chick,” doggedly she returned to the old question. “Now it’s all over, you can tell me, can’t you? What was in that package?”

Chick wasn’t going to be stuffy about it any more. He grinned this time, but shook his head. “If we don’t find it today I’ll really tell you. Not yet, though.”

“Cross your heart?”

“Cross my heart!”

From the corner of the square a big bell began a slow solemn booming and as though it was a signal, hundreds, thousands of pigeons rose against the deep blue of the Venetian sky and the sunlit columns opposite. Glinting silvery, iridescent, dark blue and rose and gold they whirled with the muffled beat and roar of a thousand wings. Cynthia gazed enthralled.

Across the square, giving access to the Merceria, the Way of the Merchants, was the clock tower. As the great painted face recorded noon two giant moors slowly struck a bronze bell with big hammers, marking the hour.

“Lovely!” murmured Cynthia. “Oh Chick, I wish ... I wish we didn’t have to go back, ever. I wish we could stay on, in one of those sweet old palaces. ...”

“Like Othello and Desdemona?”

“No ...,” slowly. “She got smothered, didn’t she? I guess I wouldn’t care for that.”

“New York will be fun too,” hazarded Chick. “And with all the advertisement you’ve had, young lady; your magazine covers on every newstand, month after month.”

“Chick! Are they really? Yes, I suppose they are, I hadn’t thought of that. Better hurry back, hadn’t I?” And then laughed at her own weather-vane mood. “Well, what shall we do next, Chick? I feel sane once more.”

Chick’s suggestion was: lunch at the Danieli, which was the swankiest hotel in Venice, and, he had heard, one of the loveliest of the old Venetian palaces. Then back to the traghetti to see if Luigi had come.

Oh, that again! Cynthia made an impatient gesture. Save us from a man with one idea! But she adored the lunch, loved the gracious old palace with its carved, minstrel gallery, its floor of multicolored tiles, its ceiling carved and painted in deep blue and rose and gold. Out into the sunlight again, and the Adriatic shimmering as blue as the ceiling, a pleasant little wind chilled by the snows of the Dalmatian Alps and the white bubble of the Church of the Salute rising across the lagoon.

“Shall we ride, or walk?” asked Chick. By the way he said it Cynthia knew he wanted to walk.

“We see more on foot, don’t we?” she suggested amiably. Perhaps a little later they could go through the Grand Canal in a gondola. And indeed she loved the great Piazza flanked by the Doges Palace, by St. Mark’s and the long colonnade of the Library and the Mint. And the shops beneath those columns most fascinating of all. Cynthia’s whole allowance for abroad had been divided between seeing places, and saving up a bit for what might, when she got home, prove to be a long wait for more work. But she had learned a lot by looking just in windows, had learned that you can so memorize a beautiful thing you can at least carry it away with you in your mind.

“See, Chick, isn’t that the loveliest old bracelet? ...” A thick circle, not quite joined, of gold, the two ends which almost touched circled with tiny crowns of blue, blue turquoises. “And oh, Chick, just look at that ring. ...” A lovely old thing of Florentine gold, studded with seed pearls and surrounding a topaz as richly dark as the gold itself. Chick put a hand on her arm and urged her along to the next window which, being full of ancient books and maps was not quite so enthralling.

Perhaps it hadn’t been really tactful to admire that ring, almost as though she had wanted it herself. She had Chick’s own ring, hadn’t she? The little emerald, very prettily set, not quite good enough, not quite old enough to be called an antique, not quite the same as though it had been bought just for her. ... Cynthia checked the feeling. It was unkind, ungracious, ungrateful. Chick was just a poster artist in the first year of his success, he had come all the way to Venice just to see her, or at least she supposed he had, for he hadn’t said so yet. ...

And thank goodness, here was the traghetti. Perhaps they’d find that stupid lost bundle of Chick’s at last.

Word must have been passed around for there was someone, Chick exclaimed that it was Luigi, waiting for them, his weathered old face a mass of interweaving laughter wrinkles. Sturdy, stocky, clad in ragged clean shirt, with the uniform black trousers and sash of the public gondolier, Luigi dashed up the short flight of steps, rushed toward them. In his outstretched hand he held a parcel, small, oh very small. Not big enough even for a quarter of a pound of butter.

It had been opened, clumsily retied with gray twine. Thrusting it into Chick’s hand he followed with a flood of rapid Italian. Once more a circle of interested onlookers threatened to engulf them.

Chick gave a hasty order, grasped Cynthia’s arm and thrust her down the steps, into the Luigi gondola. Then waved a wide gesture down the Grand Canal toward the lagoon beyond.

“Buono! ... Buono!” agreed Luigi, nodding vigorously like a porcelain mandarin. There came a faint cheer from the crowd on the quay and Cynthia recognized a few of their morning’s spectators. But the man with the galosh, the woman with the cabbage were not present. From the comfortable cushioned seat she watched palaces of kings and doges, princesses, great composers and poets glide past. This was heavenly, this was the way to see Venice, to see any place, with Chick’s hand in hers and not a care in the world.

Then she saw the little package in his other hand, glanced up inquiringly and caught the look in his eyes. Her heart skipped a beat, two beats. No nephew ever looked like that at a maiden aunt!

“Let’s,” said Chick, taking his hand out of hers, “let’s both undo the package. You do want to see what’s in it, don’t you, Cyn?”

Cynthia laughed. “Here I’ve been hustled and bustled over half of Venice, in jail and out again ...” she addressed the diminishing houses of candy pink, baby blue, as the gondola struck the wide lagoon and rocked slowly away from the town, “and he asks me, do I want to know what’s in it. Man alive, do you think I’ve got no curiosity?”

From behind them came a musical shout. Luigi warning off another gondola. Beyond him, Venice glowed pearl pink in the late light of afternoon, the long paddle made a soft ripple on the blue lagoon. Dark Italian eyes looked over their shoulders, whole heartedly, honestly as curious as Cynthia, and two heads, one brown, one blond bent close together.

Cynthia untied the knot, with slim fingers that were cold and loosened the rumpled white paper. A small box of blue stained leather beautifully tooled in gilt. She lifted the lid.

“Oh Chick ... oh you darling! Chick, is it really, really for me?”

On the third finger of her right hand she slipped it. Quaint old green gold, delicately lacy as the collar of a doge, held firmly in its heart a single pink pearl. Chick reached and took the hand in his, slipped off the ring, slid into his palm the little emerald she had worn all summer, and in its place substituted the other. It fitted as though it had been made for her. Perhaps it was.

“Just for you, yourself,” he said. “It’s quite old, four or five hundred years they told me. I got it yesterday afternoon in one of those shops you looked at, Cynthia. And I’ve been frantic all day. ... I wanted to tell you, just this way, in a gondola, with just this ring. And I couldn’t, darling, tell you before.”

“Chick, it’s the most beautiful, beautiful thing I ever saw in my whole life.”

“Isn’t it?” said Chick, but when she glanced up his eyes were not on the ring. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we’ll see the American consul. I understand he’s the marrying guy about here.”

Behind them suddenly came a great shout, baritone, Italian. “Yum tum tumti tumtum. ... Yum tiddilty tum, tum ti tumitytum. ...” Confidentially Luigi leaned forward, whispered in tones that might have been heard back in Venice. “That, ladiee, gentleman ... that ver’ fine Venezia loove song. You like?”