n--to find a family for you to stay
with, it may do. Only in that case, you mustn't stop before you get to
Florence. I'll buy your ticket straight through, by the Mont Cenis."

"No, please," Mary protested, mildly. "Not that way. I've set my heart
on going along the Riviera, not to stop anywhere, but to see the coast
from the train. It must be so lovely: and after this blackness to see
the blue Mediterranean, and the flowers, and oranges, and the red rocks
that run out into the sea; it's a dream of joy to think of it. I've a
friend who has been twice with her father. She told me so much about the
Riviera. It can't be much farther than the other way."

So it was settled, after some perfunctory objections on the part of Mrs.
Home-Davis, who wished it put on record that she had been overruled by
Mary's obstinacy. If undesirable incidents should happen, she wanted to
say, "Mary _would_ go by herself, without waiting for me. She's of age,
and I couldn't coerce her."

III

Mary felt like an escaped prisoner as the train began to move out of
Victoria Station--the train which was taking her toward France and
Italy. It was like passing through a great gray gate, labeled "This way
to warmth and sunshine and beauty." Already, though the gate itself was
not beautiful, Mary seemed to see through it, far ahead, vistas of
lovely places to which it opened. She sat calmly, as the moving carriage
rescued her from Aunt Sara and Elinor on the platform, but her hands
were locked tightly inside the five-year-old squirrel muff, which would
have been given away, with everything of hers, if Sister Rose had not
changed a certain decision at the eleventh hour. She was quivering with
excitement and the wild sense of freedom which she had not tasted in
London.

In leaving the convent she had not felt this sense of escaping, for the
convent had been "home," the goodbyes had drowned her in grief, and she
had often before driven off with Lady MacMillan, in the springy barouche
behind the fat horses. Even the journey to London had not given her the
thrill she hoped for, as rain had fallen heavily, blotting out the
landscape. Besides, she had even then regarded her stay in London with
the Home-Davises only as a stage on the journey which was eventually to
lead her into warmth and sunlight.

This train, with the foreign-looking people who rushed about chattering
French and German, Italian and Arabic on the platform and in the
corridors, se