s."

"I don't suppose the gamblers go to hear his sermons?"

"Oh, yes, they do. A good many of them feel that if they attend church
and put money in the plate, and don't play on Sunday, the rest's all
right. They can keep up a bowing acquaintance with religion that way,
anyhow. But I'll go and call on your mystery. What's her name?"

"Miss Grant."

Rose's face changed. "Oh, is it _that_ girl? I _am_ glad! Virtue is its
own reward. I shall love to have an excuse to make her acquaintance."

Dick, who had faced round in the window but was still standing, came and
sat down by his cousin.

"What do you know about her?" he asked.

"I'll tell you. It's a sort of story," she answered thoughtfully; "a
story about a picture."

XIII

"You know the two beggars who stand by the bridge, just over the
Monegasque frontier as you go toward Cabbe-Roquebrune and Mentone?" Rose
said, her eyes no longer on Carleton, but fixed upon something she alone
could see. "Of course you know they keep off Monaco territory by half an
inch or so, because begging is forbidden in the principality. There's an
old white-haired man with rather a sinister face. I'm not sure if he's
deformed in any way, or if he just produces on the mind an odd effect of
some obscure deformity. He's one of the beggars; and the other's a
little humpbacked elf of a creature, hardly human to look at, with his
big head and ragged red eyelids; but he's always smiling and gay, bowing
and beckoning. It's his _metier_ to be merry, just as it's the other's
pose to be overwhelmed with gloom."

"I know them both," said Dick. "I can't resist throwing the little
humpback a fifty-centime piece now and then, from Jim's automobile,
though Jim scolds me for it in a superior way--the way people have who
take a firm moral stand against beggars. Jim's on the firm moral stand
about a lot of things. He's a strong man, body and soul and mind, but I
have a whole brood of pet weaknesses running about that I hate to
destroy. The other day when I was going over to Nice to try my luck with
the _Flying Fish_ for the first time, I'm ashamed to say I chucked that
little red-eyed, grinning imp five francs for luck--my luck, not his?"

"It's a wonder you didn't get out and rub his hump, as a lot of gamblers
do. They say he's quite a rich man, owing to that sort of silly
superstition, but I can't resist him, either. And I feel it quite a
feather in my cap of fascination that I've made the